The Celtics shouldn’t be afraid of the Knicks

The Celtics shouldn’t be scared of the New York Knicks. I realize this could age very poorly.

I also realize that the Knicks have yet to play the Celtics with the full complement of their forces. They made a flurry of trades to bolster their roster before the deadline, including two fairly-substantial deals to add both OG Anunoby and Bojan Bogdanovic, the former missing Saturday’s win.

To continue to hedge my bets against this potentially career-ending opinion, the Knicks were also without All-NBA forward Julius Randle on Saturday, who has been out since January 27 with a dislocated shoulder. I fully understand and accept that Saturday night’s Knicks team is not the Knicks team.

But I also understand the difference between popular hysteria and visible reality. Yes, by being aggressive at and before the trade deadline, the Knicks purchased themselves 24 hours of everyone saying they’re smart and potentially dangerous in the East. Stephen A. Smith could activate Knicks fan mode and TNT cameras could cut to Spike Lee dancing in the coolest coat you’ve ever seen as the Knicks won nine straight games.

Nine is a big number, but it’s somewhat muted by their pedestrian 2-6 stretch since. This losing streak coincides largely with the losses of Anunoby and Randle, making it hard to judge the “new-look Knicks” since that team has hardly played any basketball games. The Knicks are 12-2 when Anunoby and Randle played together and 5-6 without them, which would seem to tell you all you need to know.

But welcome to Lying With Statistics 101, as even if we forget how 14 games is a pitiful sample size, the Knicks competition during the Anunoby-Randle stretch is somehow even more pathetic. The Knicks played only five teams with winning records over those 14 games, going 3-2 against them—albeit with extremely impressive wins over both Denver and Minnesota.

But the Knicks didn’t bring in Anunoby to beat two Western Conference titans. Those concerns are for June, and they would be deluded to start thinking about potential NBA Finals matchups. They’re looking at the East, which has, does and will run directly through Boston until proven otherwise.

Should the Knicks and Celtics square off in a playoff series, Anunoby will be tasked with stopping Jayson Tatum. Fear of him and his co-pilot Jaylen Brown certainly played a major role Anunoby’s acquisition, since most of the Knicks’ perimeter defenders were too small or too slow to guard them. So, let’s check out his record at doing so.

Anunoby wasn’t present for any of the Knicks’ four losses to the Celtics this year, but was more than happy to show up for six of the Raptors’ eight consecutive losses to Boston over the last two seasons. Here’s a fun, lightly annotated table explaining his defensive impact:

We don’t have any evidence of Knicks Anunoby vs. Tatum and Brown, sure, but we have a whole host of examples of his exploits against them on the Raptors as well as against their substitutes when they missed the game. And no matter how you slice it, there isn’t a shred of evidence to say Anunoby can stop or even really slow down the Celtics’ premier wings.

Nor does he solve the Porzingis Problem™, something every Eastern Conference hopeful will have to do unless the man in question gets injured, adding to the number of things about this article that may age horribly. Nevertheless, even the best version of this Knicks team would rely on Mitchell Robinson—who himself has been out since December with an ankle injury—to stymie Porzingis.

As much as I would love to make another fun table exploring how effective the Knicks have been at defending Porzingis over the years, that wouldn’t give him enough credit. The Celtics don’t just toss him the ball down low and hope for a height mismatch, but rather actively hunt them and give him extremely valuable post possessions.

The Knicks plainly lack the bodies to slow down an intentional and focused Porzingis, evidenced by him averaging 23.5 points over the four meetings this year. In the playoffs, they will have to devote more resources to him and thus take unsustainable risks defensively. In all likelihood, this will snowball out of control.

“Who is the biggest threat to the Celtics in the East?” is a frequent topic of discussion in Boston, as well as in national circles, as the Celtics run away with the number one seed. And while the Knicks made many flashy moves, there’s no way they can be seen as the biggest threat. That title goes solely to the Milwaukee Bucks, who have a whole portfolio of success against the Celtics and the single scariest player alive in Giannis Antetokounmpo.

There is theoretical danger, and then there’s what the evidence actually supports. In sports, there’s so much fluff that we have to base our fears and worries on the world in front of us, not the orange and blue colored fantasy land some fear could cause trouble for the green and white.