Skill set Tom Thibodeau unapologetically holds above all else has been defining Knicks edge
It’s funny, actually.Outside of our Gotham bubble, there are a lot of people who seem utterly smitten by the Detroit Pistons.
It’s understandable.The Pistons won 14 games a year ago.
They started this season 0-4.They were still under .500, at 25-26, as late as Feb.
5, and by then they’d already lost their exciting young shooting guard, Jaden Ivey, who broke his leg New Year’s Day.But then the Pistons put together a streak of nine wins in 10 games, they wound up tripling their win total from last season, they began to play with an appealing fearlessness and swagger, all of it led by one of the league’s most dynamic players in point guard Cade Cunningham.And in these first four games of this Eastern Conference opening-round series with the Knicks, they’ve mostly honored all of their advance notices.They don’t back down from a fracas or a fight.
They are aggressive.They shoot the 3 with abandon.
And Cunningham has been sublime: 25.8 points, 9.0 assists, 8.8 rebounds per game.They’ve been one of the hits of the NBA’s first round.Which must make this inconvenient truth a little puzzling for all of the folks throwing balloons, cookies, puppies and Valentines at the feet of the precocious Pistons:They are a game away from the golf course.The Knicks, who don’t seem to impress anyone outside of the boroughs and their suburbs, lead the series three games to one.They have done this, on one level, because they haven’t just been the better team in the fourth quarter of all four games when the money sits in plain sight on the table, they’ve been the dominant fourth-quarter team.And in some awfully fundamental ways, what we’ve seen from the Knicks in this series is what we’ve seen from the Knicks all season.
The foundational credo to Tom Thibodeau is winning.He is not one to extol the value of a close loss, and is certainly not one to ever advocate the value of a moral victory.He believes in real victories, and sometimes it means he has his phone...