Heading into Game 1 of the NBA Finals on Wednesday night, the New York Knicks are decided underdogs to win it all. FanDuel has them at +160, against -190 for the Spurs. That seems too lopsided for a series that feels pretty evenly matched on a lot of fronts, but the Knicks are no strangers to long odds.
New York opened the season with better odds, but by the time the playoffs started, they were down to +2200 to win the title. No NBA champion over the last 40 years (as far as we can trace) has entered the postseason with longer odds, meaning the Knicks are four wins away from becoming the biggest underdog in history to hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy.
Hell, they weren’t even favored to win the Eastern Conference.
Draymond Green’s name is being invoked because of his recent profane podcast rant about how Jalen Brunson hasn’t proven himself as a 1A championship player and, by extension, how the Knicks haven’t proven anything special by winning an Eastern Conference that is widely regarded as weak in comparison to the West.
“You’re supposed to get out of the East,” Green laughed. “It’s the f–king East. Of course you’re supposed to get out of the East.”
So again, it bears repeating that the Knicks were not “supposed to” win the East. The Celtics were favored. After Jayson Tatum came back, almost everyone, myself included, thought they were the cream of the conference after finishing as the No. 2 seed without their best player for most of the season. After that, the Cavaliers were next in line. New York swept them.
New York has, in fact, obliterated its postseason competition in historic fashion. Their +271 point differential, which comes out to an average margin of victory of 19.7 points per game, is the largest point differential entering the NBA Finals in history. They have swept their last two opponents and won 11 straight playoff games. The last time they lost was Game 3 against the Hawks.
You won’t get any argument from me that the East is the weaker conference. Of course it is. Has been for a long time. I’m a proponent of getting rid of conferences entirely and going to a straight 1-16 seeding format for the playoffs to end the annual inequity.
That said, we’re talking about the depth of the two conferences. No 3-seed in the East is having to play a team as good as the Timberwolves in the first round as the Nuggets did. The Knicks were the East’s 3-seed. They got the Hawks. A fine team, but a far cry from a back-to-back conference finalist.
The East is an easier path. No chance LeBron James makes it to eight straight Finals in the West. That doesn’t mean his teams weren’t championship-level rosters. Of course they were. Those Cavs teams that went to four straight against the Warriors were incredible. Only a team as stacked as the Warriors could’ve kept that team from winning multiple rings. Obviously the Heat were a title team. Twice.
The point is, there is always one or two teams in the East that can challenge the best in the West toe to toe. The Pacers took OKC to seven last year and looked like they were the favorite to win Game 7 until Tyrese Haliburton ruptured his Achilles. The Celtics won it the year before that. The Bucks two years before that. The Raptors two years before that.
The advantage comes in being that one title-caliber team that gets to enter the championship series having endured less wear and tear, which is certainly true for the Knicks entering this one. The Spurs just had to go through a seven-game war with OKC. By the time Game 1 tips, the Knicks will have had eight days of rest between their conference finals clincher vs. Cleveland and the start of the Finals.
To me, this should make the series price closer to a coin toss, but it’s not because the casual fans are treating this Wemby takeover as if it’s already written in ink and because the East is talked about as such a lesser test. Again, it is lesser than the West. As a whole. Don’t let that fool you into thinking the Knicks can’t win this thing.
They absolutely can. Think about it: The Spurs win by forcing you into a bunch of jump shots; the Knicks are shooting a postseason best 40% from 3 and have marksmen everywhere. The Spurs are deep. So is New York. The Spurs have a ton of big, physical, two-way wings. So do the Knicks, who traded for OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges to basically model their roster after the title-winning Celtics.
Shall we go on? Wembanyama blows up offenses by serving as a roaming paint protector, but the Knicks have arguably the best big-man shooter in history in Karl-Anthony Towns to pull him out. On the other side, they have, literally, the best Wembanyama defender in the league in Anunoby.
We all get that it’s tough to win a title with a small point guard as your best player, particularly one who isn’t a good defender. Excluding Stephen Curry, who is the exception of all exceptions, you have to go back to 1990 when Isiah Thomas led the Pistons to a championship to find an example of a small point guard being the 1A alpha on a title team.
Becky Hammon has publicly doubted the Knicks’ chances of winning it all for this reason, and Draymond backs her. They’re not alone. History is on their side. But Brunson has been beating the odds his entire basketball life, and at this point, if you don’t believe in his ability to do it again, and by extension the Knicks’ ability to buck the +2200 odds they started the postseason with and win the whole damn thing, you haven’t been paying attention.
