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Well, we got a little bit of a dud tonight as tale of two very different New York Knicks teams in A tale of two very different Boston Celtics teams from Game 5 to Game 6 and the Knicks are going to blow them out. We're actually starting a little bit early here. There's still four minutes left over there at msg, but tonight we're going to break down very briefly the dynamic that took place in this game. But I want to focus a little bit looking forward towards the Pacers matchup for the Knicks. We won't have our series preview until probably Sunday morning. I'm going to be working on that tomorrow, but we'll talk a little bit about my initial impressions going into that series. Then after that we'll talk about the Celtics and what they're looking at heading into this offseason. And Jackson, who produces this show, is a Celtics fan and he has put some thought into some specific targets for the Celtics this summer. And I have not seen the list yet. So we're going to work through that together and just kind of have some fun. Just kind of game planning a potential Celtics off season. Then at the tail end of the show, we'll take 5, 10 minutes of mailbag questions from the chat. So make sure you guys get your questions into the chat. When we finish here on YouTube, we're going to migrate over to Playback again. That's Playback TV Hoops Tonight or we take callers there every night. It is so much fun. We've been really enjoying building out that part of the show because it's just informal and we talk shit, we have fun, we watch film. It's just a bunch of basketball fans hanging out, having a good time. So meet us over at Playback TV Hoops tonight when we finish up here on YouTube. You guys know the drill before we get started, subscribe to the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel so you don't miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter at_jason lt so you guys don't miss show announcements. Don't forget about our podcast feed. Wherever you get your podcast under Hoops Tonight. It's also super helpful if you leave a rating and a review on that front. Jackson's doing great work on our social media feeds. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Make sure you guys follow us there and then like I mentioned earlier, keep dropping mailbag questions into the chat so that we can get to them at the tail end of the show and then again when we finish here. Playback TV Slash Hoops Tonight. All right, let's talk some basketball. So I thought the abundantly clear thing that happened right out the gates in this game was just a level of defensive intensity from the Knicks. We have another gentleman named Shane who's been working with us on the show over the course of this off season, big Knicks fan, and he was talking before we got on the stream about how it's just you never know what you're going to get with the Knicks and it, it's funny because another former person who's worked on the show, Josh Rodriguez, big Knicks fan himself, he messaged me. We were talking about it on Twitter actually, after they, after they got rid of the Pistons. And he was just talking about how Knicks fans have just been like kind of sick of this team for that type of inconsistent personality that they have. And it's just, it's very simple, like watching game five and there's very little in the way of intense physical pressure on the perimeter. There's a whole lot of just like not paying attention or communicating in transition as they repeatedly left Derek White wide open over and over and over again. And Josh Hart is talking in the post game presser about like the, this kind of multiple personality type of issue that the Knicks have. And he's just like, I don't know what causes it, but it just kind of is who they are at this point. And that is something that we'll have to keep an eye on when it comes to the Pacers series. Because the Pacers are certainly a team that does not have multiple personalities. They play the same way all the damn time. And the second you let go of the rope, they can take control of the situation. And that's going to be a theme as we head into that series. But tonight I thought the Knicks brought the necessary energy on the defensive end of the floor. OG Anunoby, I thought, set the tone right from the start with his ball pressure and physicality on Jaylen Brown. Jaylen Brown had a very rough game relative to what he looked like in game five. He just, we talked about how he didn't settle for a single pull up jump shot in game five until halfway through the second quarter. He was taking some really tough contested ones early. And often in this game there was a way less of an intentional effort to attack Jalen Brunson. Although there to Jalen Brunson's credit, they started to go at him a lot in the early third quarter stretch and he just did a great job. He just held his ground and battled. And as we zoom out from the series, I thought Brunson in particular was pretty great defensively outside of game five. And there were a lot of opportunities for Boston to try to attack Brunson, especially in game one and game two. And he just held up really well. But OG got right up in Jaylen Brown's grill right away and made him uncomfortable. The Celtics did get some easy ones in the first half that didn't go in. And if the few easy ones you get don't go in and there's a lot of pressure and good defense on these other possessions. It's just really difficult to counter that. And then the Knicks were playing with a type of desperation. You tell the Knicks knew they're like, we have to go back to, to, to the TD garden. This could get ugly for us. And so the Knicks kind of treated it like a must win and they brought the necessary energy and they threw a hell of a punch and the Celtics just didn't really have much of a chance, not with the way that they were shooting the ball tonight. Did not score over 20 points in any quarter until the fourth quarter tonight. So impressive win for the Knicks. Now let's split this up here. We're going to talk about looking forward to the Pacers matchup first and then we'll talk about the Celtics moving forward with their future. So specifically with the Pacers matchup, I'm going to say this the same way that I've been saying it with some other series around, when we've discussed the reality of going matchup to matchup, as We've now seen two of the three 60 win teams in the NBA this year lose and as Oklahoma City is at risk of potentially losing on Sunday. Although we did get a report today that Aaron Gordon, there was that weird play where J Dub dove into his legs and I thought he was just kind of playing up the injury to try to get, you know, a flagrant foul or something like that or a review, but looks like Aaron Gordon might have some sort of hamstring issue, which is very scary for a Nuggets team that I would argue Aaron Gordon's been their second best player in this postseason run. And so that obviously is a devastating loss there. But there's a chance that we could end up losing all 60 win teams before we even get out of the second round. And part of the reason for that is because more and more as the game has changed, there are just so many different ways to play and so many different types of teams and so many different types of, of stars. Even if you just look at the remaining four stars that will be leading these groups, let's say if Jokic advances or Shea advances, right, I've got Tyrese Halliburton who's like some weird, like Steve Nash mixed with a better athlete type of hybrid, modern spread, pick and roll, like keep the ball moving type of ball handler. Then I've got Jalen Brunson, who's like this small, shifty, like incredibly gifted half court, surgical scorer, SL shot maker. Then I Go out to the west and it's like I get Anthony Edwards who's like the modern version of Michael Jordan, just this huge apex athlete two guard that can shoot the shit out of the basketball. And then out of the other series we're either going to get like the modern day James Harden, this high volume scorer that is incredibly gifted at getting to the foul line, but has another layer of versatility in terms of his mid range shot making that, that even James Harden didn't have. Or the best player in the world, Nicola Jokic, who's like this big doughy center who inverts your spacing and makes just about every damn shot he takes and is probably the best passer in the game. And as you kind of zoom out and look at that, that's just these four or five remaining teams. If I went down the list for all 16 teams or all 20 if you included the play in teams, there's just so many different kinds of stars and so many different kinds of role players and schemes on defense and on offense. We've seen more zone, I feel like in this postseason than in any postseason that I can remember as so many teams have been working on mixing up coverages and different kinds of zone and entire halves where a team will run 20, 25 possessions of zone. Like this is a, a, a, a modern NBA where every series is different and arguably within the game, within the actual series themselves, every game is different. And so it is no longer about which team won more games or who had the best net rating. It's strictly about what do you have in your toolbox to manage the shifting flow of each series. So for instance, the Celtics, they move the ball, especially when they get into their matchup attacking and you either leave a opening in your coverage or if you like in game five, just concede a lot of like size mismatches that they can bully right to the front of the rim, but they don't come close to the pace and ball and player movement that Indiana brings to the table. So similarly to what we saw with Minnesota, where it like legitimately took them a lot longer than you would have expected to put away a Golden State warriors team without Steph. And I mean obviously they won the series in five games, but within those games it's like they lose game one, Game two, they blow them out, but game three, they're like trailing in the fourth quarter. Game four, it's the, the Warriors I think had a lead in the mid third quarter, like it took that they didn't dominate that team despite the massive talent advantage because of the fact that there were some realities to the way that Golden State just played a very different kind of basketball than the Lakers did. And it just took them a while to adjust to it. And so with the Pacers, there are these obvious differences. Switching like you did against Boston, that stagnated Boston, especially in game four and especially down the stretch of game one in game two. No matter what you do to Indiana, they are not going to stagnate. They are going to attack with ball and player movement. And if you do everything right, then, yeah, they'll go hunting a mismatch. But one, they're going to try to get something easy by getting you to make a mistake, botching a switch or leaving an opening otherwise not there. And two, unlike Boston, Boston will hunt mismatches, but they can get away from it. That's been the story with Boston for years. Even, even going back to before they won the title, they have had a tendency to have extended stretches where they play a certain way and have a great deal of success and then they go brain dead for like 12 minutes of real time where they just take a bunch of bad shots and fail to go back to the thing that worked. Indiana's pretty relentless about hunting those mismatches. If you switch appropriately and avoid the openings that naturally occur in their off, they will throw it to Siakam or Miles Turner against a size mismatch over and over and over again. If you end up switching, if you end up containing the ball, they have a process offensively that is relentless from the start. They pick you up full court, they try to rush you into poor offense. They push in transition like crazy. Tyrese is one of the best kick ahead passers in the NBA right now. They're going to get you in the blender, and if you survive the blender, they're going to hunt a mismatch. This is a very, very different type of series than what this Celtics series is, and it's a much better version of Tyrese Halliburton. Tyrese Halliburton is playing at a substantially higher level than he was playing for the Knicks series last year. Is his matchup specifically with Karl Anthony Towns in space. Whether it be in pick and roll coverages like a high drop or a hedge, or it be in a switch. That's going to be a key factor in the series. Tyrese Halliburton attacking Karl Anthony Towns in space. It's going to be a challenge. I, I, I expect to see a lot of Pascal Siakam and Miles Turner in post up mismatches against Jalen Brunson as they work through, you know, maybe a nem hard, a ball screen with nem hard or nice Smith and they get a switch and they're just going to throw it down there. There's a great deal of, like, trusting, of simple closeout reads. Like the Celtics when they have Tatum dancing at the top of the key and two guys are digging down into the driving lanes, the Celtics are less willing to just take that, like simple swing pass. The Pacers make that shit relentlessly. They make it like every time you sink off of a man for whatever reason, Tyrese will hit you every single time. And so it's just going to be a very different type of challenge. And I think that bodes well for Indiana, especially early in the series. And so with the Knicks having home court advantage, I think it's going to be really interesting to see if they can hold up in those first two games. Because when you play a very different team and they roll up into your arena and they're playing great basketball and they throw you in the blender, you make a few too many mistakes in game one, suddenly, even though you can solve that problem, you end up losing home court advantage in the process. And so I think that's going to be the first thing I'm watching early in the series is just how quickly the Knicks adjust defensively to what will be a very different challenge. Against the Celtics, it was about switching and containing and the individual defense in game one and game two of Brunson on Tatum and Brown, and in game four of Carl Anthony Towns on Jayson Tatum in space. This series is going to be less of that and more of the attentiveness. We saw the job that the Knicks did in transition defense in Game 5 against Boston. If they bring that type of effort, the Pacers will beat the shit out of them. And so again, like we talked earlier, this is going to be much more of a mental challenge for the Knicks than it is a physical challenge. I'm very, very excited for it. On the other end of the floor, we saw some stuff last year, right? Brunson had a great deal of success against Nemhard, not so much against Neesmith. We'll see if Ricarlisle ends up making that kind of move. But here's the thing. You end up putting a nem hard on a Mikhail Bridges. You're now conceding a lot of size in that matchup where Mikhail Bridges has been a very gifted over the top shooter in the mid range and so it's very different type of team for the Pacers to match up with this time around. I've already started watching film on this series. Weirdly enough, the one game where everybody kind of played was in that early phase of the season when the Pacers weren't playing very good basketball. But we do have three games worth of data. The Knicks were 2 and 1 in the regular season. I'm going to be watching a lot of that film tomorrow and working on that series preview. It'll be up on our feeds most likely Sunday morning, potentially Saturday afternoon. We'll let you guys know when it comes out. I'll text you or I'll put it out on Twitter and you guys can see it there, but we'll have an in depth series preview at some point in the next day or two.
