The New York Knicks are the only team in the 2020s to add a superstar in free agency, signing Jalen Brunson in the summer of 2022. Since then, they've gotten better every single season. And they've had more playoff success than the organization had seen in 25 years.
But they've never won a playoff series that they were trailing in at any point. Every time the Knicks have won a series in Brunson's tenure in the Big Apple, they started out up 1-0. And even if things got tied up after that, New York never actually conceded the series lead.
That's bad news when Game 3's final score is taken into consideration. The Atlanta Hawks took a 2-1 series lead over the Knicks with their second one-point victory of the series thus far.
And while Brunson has come back to win playoff series several times before as a member of the Dallas Mavericks, he's never done it since joining the Knicks.
Knicks need to execute 1st series comeback with Brunson to beat Hawks
After New York allowed the Hawks to win Game 2 on their home floor, they failed to flip the script in their first game on the road of the postseason. They had some wiggle room after taking Game 1 at home, but not much.
Going into Game 4 on the road, the Knicks indubitably need to tie the series up at two games a piece.
And by letting the Hawks officially start the series – at least in the eyes of Pat Riley – by being the first team to win a road game in the seven-game showdown, they were immediately at a disadvantage. Even though the series was all tied up on paper.
Mikal Bridges backed that up by referring to New York as being "down 1-1" as they headed down to Atlanta for Games 3 and 4. But after dropping the former on Thursday night, the margin for error is close to nonexistent.
Historical precedent for Knicks' Game 3 results isn't in their favor, either
Since 1984, when Michael Jordan was drafted to the NBA, the team that wins Game 3 in a series tied 1-1 has gone on to win that series over 71% of the time, according to both the Denver Gazette and the NBA on Prime broadcast of the Knicks' Thursday night tragedy.
Simply put, things can't only be evaluated in such vacuums. The Knicks' chances of coming back against the Hawks don't depend on how many other teams have made it out of series, that went from 1-1 to 1-2, in the past.
But the combination of that bad historical omen with the fact that Brunson's Knicks never trailed in any of their four series wins thus far objectively doesn't bode well for New York.
Perhaps there's consolation in this being their first season under Mike Brown. But his troubles schematically against Quin Snyder haven't necessarily been inspiring much hope, either.
The end of Game 3 showed that this truly is going to come down to the Knicks' top talent. OG Anunoby's huge 3-pointers late in the contest didn't come out of organized offense, they were late shot clock bail-outs.
Brown seems willing to continue to tinker. That hasn't necessarily gone great thus far. New York's best players need to show up, and deliver their best on the court. It's needed, even if they aren't at their best. They ran out of excuses the moment they fired Tom Thibodeau.
It's time to start really making things happen, that they couldn't while he was their coach.
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