Knicks advance to round 2 after demolishing the Hawks in game 6

What a series this has been. Truly. A roller coaster of emotions from start to finish, and honestly, I don’t even know where to begin with how this thing ended.

The Knicks opened things up strong, grabbing game 1 with a comfortable 113-102 win, and it looked like this might be a short series. Then Atlanta flipped the script entirely and took a 2-1 lead, and suddenly everyone was asking questions about New York.

A big reason for that swing? CJ McCollum, who spent the middle portion of this series convincing everybody that he was channeling the ghost of Trae Young. He led the Hawks to steal game 2 right at Madison Square Garden, and then guided his team to a game 3 win as well. Both of those wins came by a single point – 107-106 in game 2, 109-108 in game 3 – as if the basketball gods decided the drama wasn’t quite spicy enough.

In those two games, McCollum made Jalen Brunson look like a role player, straight up. He was outplaying him on every single possession, and Brunson simply could not find an answer to slow him down defensively.

But then Mike Brown made his move. Josh Hart was switched onto McCollum, and just like that, everything clicked back into place. The Knicks came out in game 4 and outscored Atlanta by 7 points in each of the first three quarters, evening the series and recapturing home court advantage with a 114-98 win. That was the turning point, though not everyone saw it clearly at the time.

The series moved back to New York for game 5, and the Knicks were in a situation where mistakes simply weren’t an option. Brunson answered the call with 39 points, and New York outscored the Hawks by 29 to take a 3-2 lead with a dominant 126-97 win. Round 2 was getting closer.

And then, finally, we got to where we wanted.

Facing elimination on their home court, the Hawks were expected to put up a real fight. Their season was on the line, and for the first few minutes, it genuinely seemed like that competitive spirit was there. Atlanta jumped out to a 9-0 run early and led 11-9, and you could almost feel the series tightening up again.

Then the disaster came – for Atlanta, that is.

The Knicks responded with an absolutely stunning 31-4 run to close out the first quarter, finishing it 40-15. That quarter alone set a franchise record as the biggest quarter win in team history. And by the time the buzzer sounded on the whole night, the records kept piling up. The Knicks carried their fury into the second quarter and built an NBA record 47-point halftime lead, going into the break up 83-36, having led by as many as 51 at one point. By the end of the night, the final score read 140-89 – the biggest playoff win in NBA history.

That’s not a typo. The biggest playoff win in NBA history.

The Knicks advance after 6 games and will now wait to see who emerges from the Celtics-Sixers series, which is heading into a game 7.

Looking back at the whole thing, it’s actually quite fascinating that New York needed six games to get through this. Because when you break down what Atlanta actually accomplished across the series, it wasn’t a whole lot. The Hawks won only 5 quarters in the entire series. They won the second quarter of game 1, 31-27. Then they took the fourth quarter of game 2, 28-15. Game 3 was their best showing, with wins in the second quarter (29-25) and the fourth (28-21), plus an even split in the third at 30-30. They grabbed the fourth quarter of game 4, 33-28. Then came empty handed in game 5. And last night, they managed to take the fourth quarter 25-23.

Here’s the thing though – the Hawks’ wins in game 4, and game 6 all came with the reserves on the floor and the games already decided. Garbage time quarter victories, essentially. Strip that away, and Atlanta really had one genuinely competitive game, one fortunate quarter and one that didn’t matter throughout this entire series. That was enough to make it go six games, which says something about the nature of playoff basketball, but it doesn’t say a whole lot about the Hawks as legitimate threats.

For the Knicks, the quest continues. A familiar opponent awaits, whoever that turns out to be.