The New York Knicks finished off a 4-0 sweep of the Philadelphia 76ers on Sunday with a 144-114 Game 4 win at the Wells Fargo Center. They tied an NBA playoff record with 11 three-pointers in the first quarter, set a franchise playoff record for total threes in a game (25), and booked a second straight trip to the Eastern Conference Finals.
The first quarter is where the game ended
The Knicks shot 11-of-15 from three in the opening quarter alone. Eleven made threes ties the most ever made in any quarter of any playoff game in NBA history. The 76ers were down 17 by the time the second unit checked in, and the rest of the night was math: every Philly comeback attempt required scoring twos against a Knicks team converting threes at 50%-plus. The closest Philly got after the first was 14.
By halftime the Knicks had 18 threes, the most ever in a half of postseason basketball. They finished with 25 — Knicks playoff franchise record, and the most in any single NBA playoff game ever. The 144 points is also a Knicks franchise playoff high, making them the fifth team in NBA history with multiple 140-point playoff games in a single postseason.
Who actually scored
Deuce McBride led with 25 points off the bench, shooting it from everywhere. Jalen Brunson added 22, Josh Hart and Karl-Anthony Towns each put up 17. Joel Embiid managed 24 for Philadelphia in what is almost certainly his last game of an injury-plagued season. The Knicks' starting five scored 89, the bench scored 55, and seven players hit at least one three. That is what a Tom Thibodeau-coached team is supposed to look like in May, and it is the first time in two years it actually has.
The context this changes
Two weeks ago the conversation was whether OG Anunoby's hamstring would force the Knicks into a defensive rotation they couldn't afford against Philadelphia. Anunoby returned, the Knicks won the series in four, and the more interesting question now is whether anyone in the Eastern Conference is positioned to survive their three-point volume.
The 76ers came in as the higher seed. They lost in four. Embiid played through the obvious limit of what his knee can do in the playoffs, and even healthy version of this 76ers core may be at the end of its window — the press conference language was already tilting that way.
What's next
Detroit leads Cleveland 2-1 in the other semifinal with Game 4 in Cleveland on Monday night. The Knicks will play whichever team comes out of that series in the Eastern Conference Finals. Detroit would be an unusually young, athletic matchup; Cleveland would be a more conventional matchup featuring Donovan Mitchell as the shot-creation answer to Brunson.
Either way, the Knicks have a week off, a healthy rotation, and a series sweep where they led by double digits in every quarter of the closeout game. That's the strongest position they've been in entering a Conference Finals since 2000.
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