The most surprising series of the second round of the NBA playoffs so far is the one between the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks.
After the Celtics won the four games between the two teams in the regular season — with an average margin of victory of 16.3 points — the Knicks have raced out to a 2-0 lead in their postseason matchup. Not only did New York win two games on the road to start the series, the Knicks came back from 20-point deficits in the second halves of both games.
How is all this happening? NBC News’ Andrew Greif and Rohan Nadkarni break down the series so far, and what to expect moving forward.
Did the Knicks win the first two games or did the Celtics blow it?
Nadkarni: The real answer is it is a combination of both. At the same time, if we’re splitting up the accountability pie, the Celtics deserve more scorn for blowing the first two games.
Simply put, Boston has made only 25 of its 100 3-point attempts this series. If the Celtics were shooting only 30% — which would still be far below their regular-season average and by far the worst of any team in the NBA — they are probably up 2-0 in this series. I don’t want to get too reductive and say “make shots”… but also, make some shots!
Greif: This is Boston’s undoing, because while the Knicks have played with an undeniable resolve all postseason — multiple comebacks secured their first-round victory against Detroit, too — they’ve also been undeniably flawed.
Game 2 was New York’s worst offensive game of its season, as measured by points scored per possession, and it wasn’t exactly a shock for a team that is scoring 10 fewer points per 100 possessions in the playoffs than during the regular season. That’s a big drop, even when accounting for the seemingly annual trend of scoring dropping in the playoffs. Yet the Knicks have handed Boston two losses in a series for the first time since 2023, anyway.
Who is most to blame for the Celtics being down 2-0?
Greif: Shoddy late-game execution that is shouldered by everyone. Boston has given up 11 more field goals, made just 15 percent of its 3-pointers, and registered a meager 6-to-5 assist-to-turnover ratio in the fourth quarter.
With 18 seconds left in Game 2, Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla designed a smart play to free star Jayson Tatum for a full sprint that turned into an easy dunk and 90-89 lead. But needing another go-ahead basket on the game’s final possession, Mazzulla went to the exact same play and the Knicks weren’t fooled. Tatum is shooting just 1-for-12 in the fourth quarter this series, while his co-star Jaylen Brown is 1-for-7.
Nadkarni: The buck has to stop with Boston’s best players, Tatum and Brown. Tatum is shooting under 30% from the field this series, and Brown isn’t doing much better, shooting under 40%. They have been inefficient, too 3-point happy, and aren’t making good decisions in crunch time.
Tatum especially needs to step up. Not because he’s not great, not because he has to prove he’s a superstar, but because he’s shown all these things already. Tatum is an incredibly accomplished playoff performer, and he’s had some big games in incredibly high-stakes moments. You wouldn’t know that from watching this series.
Can the Knicks keep this up?
Nadkarni: Almost definitely not, but they also don’t have to. There’s no rule that you have to win every game in a four-game series the same way. Even if the Celtics start hitting 3s, that doesn’t mean the Knicks can’t win this series.
I don’t expect New York to keep winning in the fashion it did in the first two games. It would be irresponsible to assume any team can keep creating 20-point deficits in the playoffs and come back to win every time. So I don’t believe the Knicks’ formula from the first two games is repeatable (even though they somehow repeated it after Game 1!), but that doesn’t mean they don’t have other ways to win.
Greif: This is fundamentally a question of what you trust more. Is it a two-game sample size that has seen the Knicks turn into a crunch-time monster — in fourth quarters this series, New York has made nine 3-pointers while Boston has made nine shots total — or their season-long body of evidence, which saw New York rank only around league average in “clutch” scenarios?
And do you view the Knicks, who are now 6-2 in the postseason against the 44-38 Pistons and 61-21 Celtics, as finally equipped to beat good teams, or the squad that went just 15-23 against teams with winning records during the regular season? They’ve captured lighting in a bottle and yet it still feels like the Celtics have a larger margin for error.
What is the Celtics’ path to winning the series?
Greif: Regression to the mean. Boston’s strategy of shooting many, many 3-pointers is nothing new, but rarely have they been this bad at it. When Celtics radio broadcaster Sean Grande dug into the numbers, he found that Games 1 and 2 marked just the second time in the last six years that the team had gone consecutive games shooting 25% or worse from 3. Will that level of shooting really sustain an entire series?
The other trend worth watching is that Boston has a .709 winning percentage on the road versus .589 at home during their last four postseasons. Playing in New York this weekend, then, might actually be a good thing.
Nadkarni: The Celtics’ path is to do what they’ve done for most of this series and pretty much all of the regular season: Overwhelm teams with their shooting talent while being stout at every position defensively. What the fourth-quarter comebacks obfuscate is that Boston has to build a 20-point lead in the first place! The Celtics have been able to dominate large portions of this series despite not shooting well at all.
Boston does not need to reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t even need to radically change its strategy, even if its frustrating watching 3s not fall after possessions with very minimal passing. But the Celtics are literally a couple shots a way from winning a series in which they’ve lost by four points combined over two games. The Cs need to stick to who they’ve been.
Biggest X factor in the series?
Nadkarni: Outside of the 3-point shooting, it’s what happening in the frontcourt. Knicks center Mitchell Robinson has been a huge plus this series, to the point Boston was desperately trying to intentionally foul him off the court in Game 2.
Meanwhile, Celtics’ center Kristaps Porzingis is dealing with a mysterious illness, and it’s made Boston much more reliant on Al Horford than it wants to be. Horford has been a steady pro for years, but he is not the offensive threat Porzingis is. Even if the center battle may not ultimately determine what happens in this series, it’s an important subplot under what’s transpired so far.
Greif: The eye test and the numbers suggest it’s Knicks big man Robinson. The Knicks have a 2-0 lead because of their defense, and when Robinson has been on the floor this series New York’s defense is 16 points better than when he sits.
But the Celtics’ Porzingis, who has played only 27 minutes because of a respiratory illness through two games, is my pick. He was a floor-raising catalyst during last year’s Celtics NBA championship but has been a shell of himself in this series, with nearly as many turnovers (two) as field goals (three). Porzingis tried to express confidence while saying that going down 0-2 “kind of takes all the pressure off of us,” but history doesn’t bear that out. Of the 463 playoff series in NBA history to start 2-0, only 34 trailing teams have eventually come back to win.
