The New York Knicks and the descent into madness 51%
By Kyle Wagner0%
6/11/2026, 7:30:16 PM
Topics: Basketball, Nba Finals
Keywords: Game 4 Knicks Spurs 3 1 Nba Finals
BS Summary: This article contains 33 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Ambiguity (Equivocation), and Appeal to Emotion, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 60.4% saturation with 896 hits. Analysis detected 4,272 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,483 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 50.9% and a BS Rank of 51% (10,445 of 21,213 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 50.80% of the article peer group.
Insanity.
There is no other explanation for the aura of chaos that has surrounded these Knicks for the past six weeks.
For whatever reason, their transformation from a perfectly adequate, third-seeded Eastern Conference contender into the most unstoppable force in basketball has driven everyone who comes into contact with them insane.
How else can you explain opponent after opponent disbelieving their lying eyes as they watch the Knicks stalk them like prey and consume them.
Wednesday night, the Knicks ripped off a 20-4 run before Spurs coach Mitch Johnson thought to call a timeout, teeing up the largest comeback in NBA Finals history, a 107-106 Knicks win.
It would be easier to lampoon him if the same thing hadn’t happened to another very good head coach in the previous round, when the Cavaliers’ Kenny Atkinson mustered just one timeout as his team surrendered a 30-8 run to end the fourth quarter in the Knicks’ last signature resurrection.
In fairness to these coaches, it must be dizzying to face an opponent for whom the past has practically zero bearing on the present, who can look like a beaten dog in one moment and begin scratching and clawing their way back on top the next.
But that’s another thing.
By every available measure, these Knicks have staked a claim as one of the greatest playoff teams in the history of the league.
No, scratch that.
Greatness is subjective.
When they’re right, these Knicks are dominant in a way that is both measurable and observable.
They mollywhopped three good teams on their way to the Finals, set records for point differential in the playoffs, and for about six quarters out of 16, they’ve embarrassed a Spurs team that won 62 regular season games and dethroned a seemingly ascendant Thunder team on the way to the Finals.
They’ve also looked rudderless, bewildered and irredeemably constipated for much of the remainder of play.
This has, of course, added up to a towering 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals.
All of which raises one gnawing little question.
*Just why in the hell does one of the best teams of all time keep finding itself down by roughly a thousand points every fourth quarter?
*
The simple answer is because the Knicks themselves make no sense, either.
Teams like this, that have been dominant the way the Knicks have been dominant, do not typically find themselves facing insurmountable deficits.
Great teams may fall behind, but they hang around, instilling a sense of dread that a 14- or 16-point lead is never safe.
The Knicks do not operate like this.
They operate in extremes.
Either they’re on or they are very, very off.
They are now 5-3 in the last two years of playoff runs in games in which they have trailed by 20.
The rest of the league is 4-71.
They’ve won both playoff games in which they have trailed by 20 points in the fourth quarter.
Since 1997, all other teams are a combined 3-750.
They exchange that sense of looming dread a more common great team imposes for one of calm, that surely this is the hole so deep that even this playoff monster will stay buried.
Then they wake up.
In Game 4, the trouble began just one minute into the game, with two soft foul calls on Karl-Anthony Towns, which kicked off 23 minutes of slapstick basketball.
With Towns sidelined, Mike Brown used 12 players in the first 14 minutes of the game.
He was scrambling, and the Knicks looked lost.
They began to foul — a lot — picking up two flagrants along the way, the first of which, by Mitchell Robinson, left Victor Wembanyama on the floor and clapping excitedly, shouting, “I’m in your head, boy!”
as Robinson turned away in disgust.
Things stabilized, somewhat, when Towns returned late in the first quarter, but not by much.
Jose Alvarado would commit his own ridiculous flagrant foul barely a minute into the second period, at which point it seemed as though the Knicks had given up on competition and were content to wallow in their discontent.
It would be neat to assign a single moment as the turning point in all this, that Method Man's “Knicks in five!”
at the end of the Wu-Tang Clan's halftime show, with the Knicks trailing 76-49, exorcised the noxious vibes left by Donald Trump's attendance in Game 3, or that Wembanyama's own flagrant foul in the third quarter rallied in the Knicks some sense of resolve or retribution.
But the truth is that they simply cut the crap.
After four consecutive quarters of disarray and frustration, the Knicks focused up and finally played their game.
Wembanyama isolates Brunson in the post and gets one, two, three chances at the rim for an indefensible bucket?
Shake it off.
Next play down, get it to Towns to draw a double and release to Mikal Bridges, who finds Alvarado all alone on the weakside for an easy three.
Brunson is doubled by Wembanyama and Stephon Castle, in the most ferocious big-small trap in the league?
The ball simply moves to Towns, then Alvarado, who drives to hold Wembanyama in the paint, then hits OG Anunoby for a wide-open three.
There was some luck down the stretch, and shot-making by Brunson, Towns and especially OG.
But mostly there was an unshakable focus on the next task at hand.
So when Josh Hart broke away with two minutes to play for what looked like a certain dunk to finally take the lead, in a game in which the Knicks had never led, and came up short, the Knicks simply played on, took the lead.
And when Brunson missed a floater over 10 feet of Wembanyama standing reach, they played on again.
Anunoby tracked down De’Aaron Fox, who attempted an inexplicable layup rather than dribbling out the clock, and blocked the shot.
And it was Anunoby again saving the day with the most indelible moment of this dream Knicks season.
But none of this, memorable as it was, represented the Knicks doing anything they hadn’t been doing for the past six weeks.
It was Fox and the Spurs — who collectively scored just 30 points in the second half — who were drawn into the insanity.
After the game, while Johnson was trying to explain the madness that had consumed his team, his answers were barely audible over the celebrity fan contingent bellowing their way out of the arena.
For the Finals, the visitors' press conferences are moved out of the usual claustrophobic annex adjacent to the Knicks’ main conference room in order to accommodate the enormous press corps in attendance.
But on Wednesday, this meant Johnson's struggle session was soundtracked by raucous cheers for Timothée Chalamet disrobing as he walked down the exit ramp.
A short time later, Dylan Harper was visibly distracted as Iman Shumpert left the building, shouting that he didn’t need security as he rushed to celebrate with fans on the street.
The move that had been intended to afford the Spurs more comfortable confines instead drew them into the insanity happening at the Garden and around the city.
That’s how it seems to go with this Knicks run: a series of logical decisions that nonetheless lead back to the circus.
The league at large has no idea what to do with this.
Two weeks ago, it was Atkinson trying to make sense of what was happening to his team.
“Analytically, we’re two out of three in the expected,” the Cavs coach said, as his team was down 3-0 in the Conference Finals.
“I don’t know if you guys follow that, but there’s an expected score, and we’ve won two out of the three.”
One week ago, it was Wembanyama in disbelief about what was happening to his team.
“It’s almost not like I have anything to figure out,” he said after a Game 1 home loss.
“It’s almost like I have to play normal, not even good.
It’s just like doing the right things is enough.
When we play bad, when I play bad, is when we shoot ourselves in the foot.
This is why I’m not worried.
We’re going to be so much better.
I’m going to be so much better.”
He was better.
They were better.
And then they weren’t.
The Knicks are up three games to one in the NBA Finals.
Two of their wins have felt like accidents.
Of course the series is still in doubt — we’re just 10 years removed from the most infamous 3-1 series choke in league history.
And of course the Spurs think they have every chance to get back into this thing, even with a loss as harrowing as that one.
It makes sense.
The problem is, when the Knicks are rolling, they can knock the sense right out of you.
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100%flagged-word coverageIman Shumpert
31 attributed words17% of attributed speech92% writer coverage
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