After the Knicks' miraculous Game 1 victory against the heavily favored Celtics, too much of the coverage has been centered around what went wrong for the Celtics, not what went right for the Knicks.
The Celtics, by all accounts, had an abysmal shooting night. They went 34-of-97 from the field, 35 percent, which was their lowest field goal percentage of the entire season. They only hit 15 of their 60 3-point attempts, which was their sixth-worst 3-point percentage of the season.
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— AOP_NBA (@aop_nba) May 6, 2025
The Knicks wanted them taking those shots
The Knicks dared the Celtics to beat them individually. Jayson Tatum took 15 threes, 14 of them were self-created, off the dribble threes. He took an average of 6.3 dribbles before his 3-point attempts, and 80 percent of his threes were heavily contested. All of that was a product of design.
Too often in sports media, when a team viewed as superior loses, the sole focus becomes why that team failed, rather than why the winning team succeeded. Multiple things can be true at the same time. Yes, when the Celtics built a 20-point lead in the third quarter, it is fair, and likely correct, to argue that they should have applied more pressure on the rim, gotten some paint touches, and tried something new.
It is also fair to say that Tom Thibodeau made some incredible adjustments and implemented a new defensive strategy that clearly bothered the Celtics and made them overly reliant on taking sub-optimal shots.
As a team, 45 percent of Boston's 3-point attempts were self-created. That wasn't an accident, and is just as big a part of the story as the fact that the Celtics missed so many of them.
According to the league's tracking data, the Celtics took 17 shots at the rim, hitting only 10 of them. Again, some of those misses may be looks that they would make most of the time, and it is fair to point it out. As with the 3-point shooting though, that isn't the whole story.
OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges played phenomenal defense, using their strength and size to make nothing easy, even when the Knicks' defensive shell was cracked. For example, in the play below, Jaylen Brown drives past Josh Hart, but Karl-Anthony Towns makes a fantastic rotation to contest the shot and ultimately get a block.
Who gets the credit matters to the fans, not the Knicks
If you polled 100 random Knicks fans, I'm sure many of them would share the same feelings that the Knicks haven't received the credit they deserve for pulling off the overtime win in Game 1, and I would agree with them.
That said, I highly doubt a single player in the Knicks' locker room cares at all who gets the credit. All that they care about is that they got the win, and now that the game is over, all they care about is trying to get another one.