Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I’m rooting for the Oilers to break Canada’s Stanley Cup drought, but I’m not convinced it’ll happen after Connor McDavid went against years of superstition and touched the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl.
In today’s SI:AM:
😅 Knicks still alive
🏒 Oilers win the West
🏈 The trouble with NFL Olympians
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Knicks’ defense stands tall (for once)
If the version of the New York Knicks that showed up in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals had shown up in the first four games, they wouldn’t be staring down the prospect of another elimination game tomorrow night.
The Knicks saved their season at Madison Square Garden last night with a dominant 111–94 win over the Indiana Pacers in Game 5. After struggling to contain Indiana’s high-pace offense in the first four games of the series, the Knicks turned in one of their best defensive performances of the postseason to keep their championship hopes alive.
It was the first time in these playoffs that the Pacers were held under 100 points. They hit just 40.7% of their shots (their lowest field goal percentage in a game this postseason) and turned the ball over 20 times (their most this postseason). Indiana’s two star players—Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam—were completely shut down on offense. Siakam had 15 points on 5-of-13 shooting and Haliburton had just eight points on 2-of-7 shooting.
It’s been a weirdly up-and-down series for Haliburton. He erupted for 31 points and hit the iconic game-tying buzzer-beater in Game 1, and was utterly dominant with 32 points, 15 assists and 12 rebounds in Game 4. But he was just so-so in Games 2 and 3, scoring a combined 34 points on 12-of-31 shooting.
“Rough night for me,” Haliburton said after Game 5. “I gotta be better setting the tone, getting downhill. I feel like I didn’t do a great job of that, but I’ll watch the film. There were some different things they did defensively.”
Haliburton was oddly passive in the loss, a dramatic departure from the confidence and control he showed in Indiana’s comeback win in the first game in this building. His seven shot attempts were tied for the second fewest in his 30 career playoff games.
The crowd inside the Garden was raucous from the start, and the Knicks fed off that energy, building a 10-point lead before eight minutes had elapsed. They scored first and never looked back. There were no lead changes or even any ties at any point in the game.
“To start the game, we just didn’t have the right level of force, the right level of attitude necessary, in this environment,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “It was a bad start. We never had a lead in the game. There were a multitude of things that were going wrong. And there were times, there were stretches during the game where we got a little bit of traction, but never enough.”
The Knicks two best players stepped up when their team needed them. Jalen Brunson had 32 points (including 16 in a lights-out third quarter) for his 10th 30-point game of the playoffs, and Karl-Anthony Towns played through a knee injury to put up 24 points and 13 rebounds.
The odds of the Knicks pulling off a comeback are still remote. Only 13 teams in NBA history have ever successfully come back from a 3–1 deficit in a best-of-seven series. New York may have unlocked something defensively in Game 5, but it will be difficult to replicate that defensive success on the road in Game 6. The Knicks lived to fight another day, but it may have been too little too late.
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- Ryan Phillips compiled a list of the numbers that explain why the Cubs are off to a division-leading start.
- Chris Sale reached 2,500 career strikeouts faster than any pitcher in MLB history.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
5. A physical bucket by Karl-Anthony Towns.
4. An emotional reunion between former Cavs teammates J.R. Smith and Kevin Love at MSG.
3. Charles Barkley’s line about going to hell during the halftime show on TNT. The Knicks’ win means we’ll get at least one more game with traditional Inside the NBA crew.
2. Connor McDavid’s blazing speed for a breakaway goal.
1. Braves center fielder Michael Harris II’s leaping catch to rob a home run. He made another great play for the final out of Atlanta’s win over the Braves.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | The Knicks Were the Best Version of Themselves in Game 5.
