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.
4 Head coach Tom Thibodeau of the New York Knicks reacts in Game Four of the Eastern Conference First Round NBA Playoffs against the Detroit Pistons at Little Caesars Arena on April 27, 2025 in Detroit, Michigan.
Getty Images
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 phones tapped and his movements tracked by the Minutes Police, who tend to be obsessed about things like overused players (this at a time when the issue that simultaneously alienates fans most about the NBA is load management).
'Winning,' he has said frequently for five years, 'is the only thing that matters.'
It remains puzzling to those of us who see the logic in those words that the Knicks — mostly Thibodeau, but also the team as a whole — find themselves practically mocked every year for their affinity and proclivity for winning. Caring so much about regular-season wins, we keep hearing, is silly. Obscures the bigger picture.
And so if you point out that the 51 wins the Knicks earned this year were the franchise's second most in 28 years, you are dismissed: 'Regular-season wins,' comes the usual retort, contemptuous spittle with every syllable.
4 Jalen Brunson of the New York Knicks shoots the ball during the game against the Detroit Pistons.
NBAE via Getty Images
If you answer with the fact that over the past two seasons, including playoffs, the Knicks have now won 111 games … well, don't expect a concession speech: Show me the rings! And sure, that is the ultimate goal. And it is a goal that seems likely to be out of the Knicks' range because the teams above them on the food chain — Thunder, Cavaliers, Celtics — have deeper and stronger rosters.
But the men who populate the Knicks roster are unfazed by that. They choose to play winning basketball anyway. They've won those 111 games the past two years. They're up 3-1 in this series — 48 minutes away from a likely and long-anticipated showdown with the defending champion Celtics — because they happen to know a thing or three more about winning than most teams do.
4 Knicks guard Pacome Dadiet, center, celebrates with center Karl-Anthony Towns (32) late in the fourth quarter of their win over the Detroit Pistons in Game 4.
AP
And not just against lousy opponents, which is one piece of testimony that always comes up when you mention just how many games they've won lately. All four games with the Pistons were toss-ups when it mattered most, in the fourth quarter. The Knicks have found a way to win three of them, and they've done it by out-Pistoning the Pistons:
They've been the tougher team, by far, in the fourth quarter
They've made the key 3s every time in the fourth quarter.
Want a profound and possibly overlooked juxtaposition? How's this: At the tail end of the third quarter in Game 3, Josh Hart — fully aware the clock was melting away — quick-shot a banker with 0.1 seconds left. In Game 4, after a steal, Dennis Schröder, oblivious to the clock, eschewed a layup and lobbed a show-me lob to Tim Hardaway Jr., who dunked it a tenth of a second after the third-quarter buzzer. The Knicks won Game 3 by the margin of Hart's savvy; the Pistons lost Game 4 by one of the two easy points Schröder showboated away.
4 Josh Hart of the New York Knicks pulls down a rebound as Cade Cunningham of the Detroit Pistons watches during the second quarter.
Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post
And for all the love showered upon Cunningham, he is clearly the second-best point guard in this series. Jalen Brunson is scoring more (33.3 to 25.8), is virtually even in assists (8.8 to 9.0) and is outshooting Cunningham overall (46.0 to 44.4) and from 3 (35.5 to 25.0).
Maybe learning how to win isn't such a silly hobby after all. Maybe that particular skill set comes in handy when it's time to win the games that matter most. Maybe.
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