Knicks Carrying Carefree Mindset Into Round 2 Battle With Celtics

There’s no question that the Boston Celtics are the big brother while the New York Knicks are the underdog in their Eastern Conference semifinal matchup, set to kick off at TD Garden on Monday night.

Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and the Celtics are the reigning champions. They underwent minimal roster changes last offseason and won 61 games in the regular season with a league-best 33 victories on the road. Four of those wins came against Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and the new-look Knicks, built to compete and dethrone Boston in the playoffs. But each time New York faced the title defenders, the Celtics made an example out of the Knicks, en route to a 4-0 season series sweep.

New York’s locker room, however, doesn’t give a damn.

“I don’t care,” Knicks guard Josh Hart said Sunday, per Zach Braziller of the New York Post. “If we’re counted out already, then we should play with a great level of freedom. We don’t really care too much what the outside world says. We’re focused on how we feel internally and going about it that way.”

The Knicks failed to figure out the Celtics in the regular season so badly that Boston averaged 125 points on 50% shooting from the field and 43.5% shooting from 3-point range. Tatum forced their regular-season finale into overtime after draining a heroic step-back three at Madison Square Garden, and right in front of Knicks legend Carmelo Anthony. Boston capitalized with a 119-117 win over New York to remind everyone in attendance of the gap between both teams.

Fast forward to the semifinals and regardless of Spike Lee’s obnoxious sideline support — and outfits — plus the prematurely confident “We want Boston” chants from Knicks fans, the Celtics are (again) the favorite. Some, in fact, don’t even expect New York to put up a fight, as the team failed to do four times already.

But if you relayed that message to head coach Tom Thibodeau’s squad, it’d go through one ear and right out the other.

“It’s the regular season. It means nothing,” Hart said. “There’s bits and pieces you can take from it, but at the end of the day, the series is zero-zero. The playoffs are a different game. So, you can’t think about the regular season. At the end of the day, that’s the team we were weeks ago, months ago.”

Boston already made an example of the Orlando Magic in the first round by showing a side most teams aren’t used to seeing from the Celtics. When the three-ball wasn’t falling, instead of accepting the fate of hurling shots from beyond the arc, Boston adjusted and detected interior scoring opportunities at a rate we didn’t see from the Celtics during the regular season. It was consistent throughout the series and helped drown Orlando in its leftover Game 3 confetti.

Tatum, too, flipped the switch and cued an aggressive approach that the six-time All-Star didn’t demonstrate nearly as much last postseason. He missed Game 2 with a wrist injury and bounced back with a historic run by joining Larry Bird as the only other Celtics player to score 35-plus points in three consecutive playoff games. If that streak continues, Hart and the Knicks are in for a rude re-awakening.

“There’s a lot to be able to take from that (Knicks-Detroit Pistons) series because they played a ton of close minutes,” Boston head coach Joe Mazzulla said before Game 1, per CLNS Media. “And you have to have an understanding of how you get to that point, and when and if you’re in that point, how can you be effective on both ends of the floor. So there’s stuff there and we just have to be ready to execute.”

The Celtics and Knicks haven’t crossed paths in the playoffs since 2013.