This Knicks team is something basketball has never seen

 It shouldn’t look this easy. Climbing the road to the NBA Finals isn’t this easy. What the New York Knicks are doing is beyond comprehension. On the way to their first NBA Finals since 1999 the Knicks aren’t just sweeping their way through the playoffs, which they are, they are destroying teams and leaving zero doubt as to who is the better team. Karl-Anthony Towns said postgame “there’s nowhere better in the world than when The Garden has hope.” There isn’t just hope in the Mecca of Basketball, there is complete belief.

When the playoffs started, the Atlanta Hawks were the hottest team in the NBA. The Hawks created a modern NBA juggernaut. The Knicks dispatched of Atlanta with the largest margin of victory in a close game in NBA history with a 140-89 win on the road. Philadelphia came back from a 3-1 deficit against a Boston Celtics team that was the favorite to come out of the Eastern Conference when the playoffs started. But the 76’ers didn’t belong on the same floor as the Knicks as New York swept them so hard out of the playoffs, Xfinity Mobile Arena looked like it was Madison Square Garden. Next up,  a Cleveland Cavaliers team that defeated the Detroit Pistons—a Detroit team that beat the Knicks in all five meetings in the regular season and won those games by a margin of nearly 20 points. No matter what the analytics in Cleveland might say, the Knicks made the Cavaliers quit. Knicks Captain Jalen Brunson said “we’ve been locked into the moment… we need to continue to do that” about the historic level of play the Knicks have showcased when closing series out this postseason.

A run like this doesn’t happen in professional basketball. Bill Russell never did this. Neither did Magic, Bird, or Michael Jordan. Kobe and Shaq couldn’t do this. LeBron in his historic eight-straight Finals appearances never got to this level of domination over opponents. Or the modern NBA dynasty of Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Kevin Durant. Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby and company are.

A tall task does stand in front of this team as they wait for an opponent to play. Winning the franchise’s first title since 1973 wouldn’t be easy—and it shouldn’t. But the Knicks will have to go through either a team looking for back-to-back championships in the Oklahoma City Thunder with the current two-time reigning MVP in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.  Or a team looking for revenge from December’s NBA Cup Final loss and a player in Victor Wembanyama looking to take over the league for the next 10 years and start by dismantling the Knicks. It will be an epic series and one that will most likely get talked about for generations to come in and around New York City. But you’re going to have to wait.

You’ve waited 27 years for another shot at a title and 53 years to taste that championship champagne. What’s eight more days?