DETROIT — The love from the fans and media for last season’s Knicks lived strong and is dying hard. They overachieved. They outrebounded. They were, in many ways, the embodiment of that glorified ’90s Knicks identity.
As dedicated Knicks fan and Public Enemy rapper Chuck D tweeted Saturday, “Donte DiVincenzo has a cult-like basketball following in New York.”
But DiVincenzo and those Knicks are gone — replaced by higher expectations, an identity of scoring finesse over grit and a squad that is sitting two wins from advancing to another conference semifinals.
The message Saturday from Josh Hart — who is among the most important holdovers from last season’s squad — was to embrace these new Knicks instead of dwelling in the past.
“If you continue to look back and compare yourself to years prior and teams prior, you lose the perspective of what you have,” Hart said. “And this team — we don’t care about the toughness, because we feel like we have the toughness, but we also feel like we have the offensive firepower to go out there and put up 140 points. So it doesn’t really affect us. I just think it’s idiotic to compare us to the past, because we’re the New York Knicks of 2024-25. And it’s either you get behind us or you don’t. And if you’re not, stay on that side when we have success.”
In other words, it’s time to get on board or don’t come crawling back.
“Comparisons are the thief of joy,” Hart said. “We’re going to compare ourselves to last year, for what? We don’t got Donte, we don’t got [Isaiah Hartenstein], we don’t got [Julius Randle]. … We don’t have any of those guys. And now we got a totally different group and a totally different personality.”
This Knicks iteration holds a 2-1 series lead heading into Sunday afternoon’s Game 4 at Little Caesars Arena. A win would almost certainly clinch advancement — teams with a 3-1 advantage have won over 95 percent of those series — with a potential second-round showdown looming against the mighty Celtics.
On Saturday, the Knicks practiced in a high school gym outside of Detroit, with Tom Thibodeau preaching for the elimination of distractions.
“The noise, that’s your job [in the media] to create. So we’ve got to stay away from that, and for us, it’s to concentrate on what we have to concentrate on. It’s not easy,” Thibodeau said. “I think the playoffs, there’s an emotional part of that. And there’s the media, social media, a lot going on there. So eliminate that stuff. Whether it’s praise or criticism, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what we think. Get yourself ready to play. You have to understand what wins in this league.”
Much of the “noise” about this series has been regarding the levels of physicality. In Game 2, the Knicks were soft and lost.
In the Game 3 victory on Thursday, they were aggressive and forceful or, as Pistons center Paul Reed said Saturday, “they were holding, pushing, making us work for every spot, every inch.”
The physicality discussion frequently reroutes back to last season’s Knicks, who lost in the playoffs because of injuries and talent, rarely because they were outhustled.
But the purpose of restructuring the roster — specifically trading for Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns — was to raise the ceiling. It worked toward efficient scoring with a starting lineup that pushed the Knicks to fifth in offensive rating during the regular season.
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Will it work in the playoffs?
The Knicks can take another step toward proving it Sunday in Detroit, with an eye on the future rather than on last season.
“Playoff time is different,” Hart said. “Obviously, you wanna go out there and win every game. That’s not realistic, but we just wanna win every game. We don’t focus on rest or trying to make it a short series or not. We wanna go out there and win every game, win every possession and whatever happens, happens. That’s our mentality. It never really changes.”