Take a look at these two shooting slash lines, showing the percentages from the floor, three, and the charity stripe: 56/43/75 against 45/34/94.
One team couldn’t miss, the other one missed shots more often than not. The shots were pretty balanced with one side hoisting 81-35-12 and the other one 82-38-16. The former figures belong to the Celtics, the latter to the Knicks.
For two quarters and change, New York played a respectable host to the visiting Beantowners inside The Only Garden. After a few minutes into the second half, however, the Knicks unraveled and there was nothing the dudes could do about it. Not when the guys assaulting Manhattan were playing with their shooting-accuracy slider set-up to a 99.
The result? A first-half 62-58 tightly-contested battle… but a final 116-102 one-sided lost war.
So fluky was Boston shooting that they went on a silly 33-13 run that buried New York 20 points under. So fluky was it, that the Knicks made it a reasonably-winnable game (nine-point distance) with less than ten minutes left in regulation before imploding mightily.
While it’s true the Knicks never led the game after the first nine minutes of play on Saturday, it’s also true that finished three of four quarters either tied or no more than four points behind the Celtics’ outcome. Of course, the only quarter in which they failed to do so, coming off the halftime break, sealed the loss for them—35 points for Boston, 26 for the Knickerbockers.
This (h/t @KnickCentral) happened in the fourth quarter, but you get an idea of how things went for the Garden inhabitants and what could have happened if a certain trio of frontcourt starters had been on the floor and available.
