Subscribe
Follow Us
The New York Knicks are being humbled really quickly through the first two games of the 2025 Eastern Conference Finals. After being well on their way to securing a Game 1 victory then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, they had to put up a herculean effort to avoid going down 2-0 to the Indiana Pacers despite the first two games of the series being at home. Instead, they allowed the Pacers to run away with the game in the fourth quarter, falling behind by double digits and unable to muster a fourth-quarter comeback en route to a 114-109 Game 2 defeat.
Now, a 2-0 deficit in a series isn't exactly a death sentence quite yet. However, it doesn't happen too often that when the team with the homecourt advantage drops the first two games, they still win the series. This will certainly raise alarm bells for the Knicks, as this is the first time in the team's history that they lost the first two games of a playoff series at home, as per Josh Dubow of Associated Press.
The odds definitely aren't in the Knicks' favor. Of the 464 times that a team has taken a 2-0 series lead in the playoffs, only 34 have ever come back from that deficit. And of those 34 teams, only five have done so while having homecourt advantage. For those counting at home, a grand total of 1.1 percent of teams in NBA history have done what the 2025 Knicks are attempting to do (all stats are courtesy of Land of Basketball).
The last team to go down 2-0 after losing both games at home to start a series were the 2021 Los Angeles Clippers. That series was weird, as the only home game any team won was Game 7, when the Clippers finally took care of the Dallas Mavericks for good.
But with the Pacers being a noticeably better playoff team on the road this postseason, there is still hope for the Knicks to mount a series comeback.
Knicks' defense has to be better
At the end of the day, the Knicks simply allowed too many easy buckets for the Pacers. There were botched coverages for the Knicks, which perhaps led to Karl-Anthony Towns' extended stint on the bench towards the end of Game 2, and this simply cannot happen against a Pacers team that will swing the rock to find the open guy on nearly every possession.
Game 3 is when the Pacers will be at their most vulnerable. They were blown out by the Milwaukee Bucks and Cleveland Cavaliers in the Game 3 of those respective series, and the Knicks most certainly will have to play with a sense of desperation as if their season is already on the line.
