The Knicks did more than beat the Hawks on Thursday. They overwhelmed them, 140-89 in Game 6, and moved within one win of the next round with a 3-2 series lead.
The win was not close after the opening minutes. New York led 40-15 after the first quarter and, at one point, was ahead 60-19. The Knicks have now won their last three games by a combined 96 points, a stretch that stands out even in a postseason built on run after run.
Josh Hart said the result mattered because the Knicks felt they had let two games slip away earlier in the series. He said the team wanted to come out with sharp attention to detail and focus from the start, and that the opening has been one of New York’s better parts of the matchup.
The numbers tell the rest of the story. Pacôme Dadiet and Ariel Hukporti were on the floor for a combined 20 minutes in the postseason game, part of a broader shift that has given the Knicks a different edge. No team in the playoffs has demolished an opponent to that degree, and the margin reflected how completely New York took control once it settled into its plan.
That change has been building. The Knicks altered their offense in the postseason after falling behind 2-1 in the series, and their focus looks different from the one they carried through stretches of the regular season, when their attention to detail reportedly rose and fell from week to week.
Mike Brown’s approach has also played a role. He dusted off players who had not been used much near the end of the regular season and sat others who had been playing more, a reset that appears to have sharpened the group. Brown said Quin Snyder and his staff helped the Knicks get better, and added that he believed the same could be said in return. Snyder pushed “a lot of the right buttons,” Brown said, and the back-and-forth forced each side to keep finding ways to improve. “I appreciate that,” he said.
For now, New York looks like the most stable team in a chaotic Eastern Conference. The Celtics have blown a 3-1 lead and now face a Game 7 against the 76ers just to stay alive, while the top-seeded Pistons still need two more wins over Orlando before they can be treated as a real East contender. Cleveland, meanwhile, is still grinding through problems with Toronto. Against that backdrop, the Knicks’ surge feels less like a hot streak than a team arriving at the right time.
The next step is simple: keep the level of play that turned Game 6 into a rout. If the Knicks carry even part of that pace and precision into the next round, they will be the team everyone else in the East has to chase.