Knicks are suddenly hoping history repeats itself after ripping apart the 76ers

Sweeping the Philadelphia 76ers is a special brand of sweet for the New York Knicks, and their fans. And if it’s anything like the team’s last successful broom-brandishing postseason victory, it’ll be a precursor to at least an NBA Finals cameo. 

As NBA stats aficionado Keerthika Uthayakumar pointed out while the Knicks were laying the smackdown on the Sixers, this marks their first best-of-seven-series sweep since they dispatched the Atlanta Hawks in Round 2 of the 1999 playoffs. 

Virtually all of us know what happened next: New York went on to make the Finals.

The Knicks are in championship-winning company

This isn’t an attempt to draw Sharpie’d parallels between the 1999 team, and this year’s squad. Those Knicks were an eight-seed. They also went on to get the crud kicked out of them in the championship round, at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs’ burgeoning dynasty.

Still, with the exception of last year when they made the conference finals, emerging from the East hasn’t seemed so possible, so likely, since that rollicking underdog unit of nearly 30 years ago. 

This time, though, making it to the Finals would come as the favorite. Because with all due respect to the 60-win Detroit Pistons, that is what the Knicks have become over this latest seven-game winning streak. 

To that end, this isn’t purely related to dismantling the 76ers. The Knicks’ complete and utter dominance in multiple elimination games doesn’t just put them on a Finals track if history were to repeat itself. It puts them in the company of eventual champions:

The NBA is very much a “What have you done for me lately?” league. But rooting for history to repeat itself befits this case. 

This is unchartered territory for the Knicks

As competently run as the Knicks have been run for the past half-decade or so, they have not yet laid the groundwork for this type of nostalgia. Last year’s team may have come within two victories of a Finals appearance, but there was an undercurrent of behind-the-scenes drama and speculation that, inevitably, played out publicly once the Indiana Pacers gave them the ax.

This year’s squad oozed identical vibes for much of the season—especially following their NBA Cup victory. It wasn’t too long ago many were wondering, if not outright calling for, the front office to jettison Karl-Anthony Towns, Mikal Bridges, and just generally accepting that this core wasn’t it.

Well, as it turns out, this core might be it. If it’s not, this is by far the closest they’ve come to being it since the last time the franchise won a title in 1973—over 50 years ago. 

That 1999 team was an underdog. The 2013 squad headlined by Carmelo Anthony that won 54 games never felt dominant. Better superstars and stars always seemed to obstruct the Patrick Ewing-era Knicks. 

This year’s team is something else. It has worn a ton of different hats, and engendered scores of polarizing evaluations, most of them unflattering. That roller coaster of emotions has given way to consistent, unrelenting playoff dominance—all-encompassing annihilation unlike anything the Knicks have shown or hinted at in modern vintage, and that they didn’t reveal until Game 4 of the first round, when many were penciling them in for dead. 

If we’re being honest, this team shouldn’t be rooting for a repeat of history from 1999. Or from 1994. At this moment, even with the Oklahoma City Thunder and San Antonio Spurs lurking out west, it is good enough, great enough, to aim higher, to hope for something more: a repeat of how the 1973 playoffs ended—which is to say, with a ring.

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