The Knicks Picked the Perfect Time to (Apparently) Become a Superteam
The Knicks came into the playoffs looking like just another contender. Now up 2-0 in the Finals, New York is tracking for one of the most dominant postseason runs in NBA history.
Ahead of Game 3 of the NBA Finals tonight, the Knicks find themselves in a surreal position: They’re up 2-0 on the Spurs in the championship round, having already won more road Finals games in this series than they have in total since 1973, and now they’ll return to a Madison Square Garden crowd that is about to explode. (Or is that just fans’ credit scores?)
They’re favored to win according to both the prediction markets (78 percent) and the stat models (86 percent), and not just because teams up 2-0 win overwhelmingly often — though that 32-5 all-time record in the Finals doesn’t hurt. It’s also because the Knicks’ playoff dominance is staggering, even after winning a nail-biter in Game 2.
That game, which New York won by 1 point on Victor Wembanyama’s missed 20-foot jumper in the waning seconds, stands out as the exception in the Knicks’ overall playoff run — almost literally so. In 14 wins during the 2026 playoffs, N.Y. has only two by single-digits, Friday night and Game 2 of the second-round sweep over the Sixers, won by only 6 points. They also have two losses, each by a single point and none since April 23. Add it up, and the Knicks still have the highest average PPG differential (+17.6) in a single postseason in NBA history, and it’s not particularly close. (Next are the 1971 Bucks at +14.5.)
And for anyone who might have been inclined to discount the Knicks for running through the East, which went 220-232 against the West during the regular season, we can make a simple adjustment for this by accounting for what a league-average team would have done against their playoff opponents from the regular season, both in terms of winning percentage and PPG margin. If we do that, the 2026 Knicks have won 7.7 more games than we’d expect from an average team against the Hawks, 76ers, Cavs and now Spurs, and their PPG margin is +21.0 compared with expected.
Among all NBA Finals teams through Games 1-2 of the championship, New York ranks No. 4 in wins above expected (trailing the 2017 Warriors, 1993 Bulls and 1995 Rockets) and No. 1 in PPG margin over expected (solidly beating the 2017 Warriors’ +19.9 mark):
What’s truly remarkable about these Knicks, though, is how un-telegraphed their level of dominance was ahead of time.
As I wrote before the Finals, New York had been trying — and failing — to smash through the Eastern Conference ceiling for a long time, winning the seventh-most playoff games (23) in any three-year span without a Finals appearance, and joining the 1989-91 Chicago Bulls as the only teams to follow that many fruitless playoff wins with a Finals breakthrough in Year 4.
In their past three regular seasons, the Knicks had an average PPG differential of +5.0 — including a +6.4 mark in 2025-26, fifth-best in the NBA — which was a perfectly respectable mark for a contender, ranked fourth in the league. But it hardly indicated an upper-echelon championship favorite, much less a team that was ready to embark on one of the greatest postseason runs in NBA history.
The average eventual champion carried differentials of +6.6 in the regular-season they won and +5.3 in the previous three regular seasons, both benchmarks New York fell short of. And the average champion with a Top-30 all-time adjusted playoff PPG differential was even higher, at +8.1 and +6.2 respectively. The Knicks’ previous résumé would rank around the 30th percentile in that club by both measures.
And it’s not like the Knicks made a huge overhaul to their roster like some of the other humble-beginnings entries at the top of that chart. The 1971 Bucks had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar coming off his rookie season and had just added Oscar Robertson from the Royals. The 2016 Cavs had added LeBron James and Kevin Love just a year earlier. The 1967 Sixers had added Wilt Chamberlain just a half-year earlier than that.
Even the 2001 Lakers and 1991 Bulls had all-time legends on the roster with more to give — and Phil Jackson at coach to coax it out of them. There were reasons to believe all of those teams could punch above their prior track records.
For the Knicks, their blockbuster moves in recent seasons centered around adding Karl-Anthony Towns — a player many doubted could ever anchor a team’s championship hopes — and supporting pieces like OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges at steep price-tags. If the Knicks were to make the Finals at long last, the hypothetical future in which that happened seemed like it would involve them squeaking through the East before probably being Gentleman’s-Swept like the 1999 version was by a superior West champ.
Instead, they have — with little to no warning — leapfrogged their way to the absolute top of the all-time list of single-playoff NBA teams. There is no doubt that Wemby and the Spurs will make adjustments from here, and that the last two wins separating the Knicks from their first championship since 1973 will be, by far, the toughest ones this group has ever had to earn.
But the fact that they are even in this conversation at all — after entering the playoffs with the résumé of a merely solid contender, not a historic buzzsaw — is what makes the whole thing so shocking. Then again, what else should we expect from an unprecedented era of NBA history that has given us eight different champs in eight years, except for No. 8 to be the strangest and least predictable of them all?
Filed under: NBA
You're right to note that the Spurs will play better and the Knicks will need to play their best to win two more games. Knick fans know that winning this year vs. the Spurs is going to be the easiest it will be for a long long time.