Indiana Pacers guard T.J. McConnell (9) is defended by New York Knicks guard Miles McBride (2) during the first half of an NBA basketball game in New York on Feb. 10.Peter K. Afriyie/The Associated Press
Back when the New York Knicks would annually march on in the playoffs, they’d almost always run into the Indiana Pacers.
With the teams set to renew their playoff rivalry Monday in the Eastern Conference semi-finals, it’s easy to think back to those rough and rugged tussles in the 1990s. But while the matchup may be old school, Jalen Brunson and the Knicks are bracing for an opponent who plays a new-age style.
Tyrese Haliburton runs the NBA’s highest-scoring offence, with Indiana putting numbers on the scoreboard that make the ones in the past Knicks-Pacers contests look like a different sport, not just a different century.
“I guess whenever you have the original teams from back then, there’s always going to be some type of history,” Brunson said. “But you have two good teams who play very, I don’t want to say different, but like, they play their own style of basketball. And so it’s going to be a grind of who’s going to go out there, who’s going to want it more, who’s going to try to go get it.”
Brunson led the No. 2-seeded Knicks past Philadelphia in the first round, sending the Knicks into the East semi-finals in consecutive seasons for the first time since making nine straight trips between 1992 and 2000.
He scored 40 or more points in the final three games, just the seventh player in NBA history with three straight 40-point games in the playoffs. The league’s No. 4 scorer in the regular season tops all players in the postseason with 35.5 a game.
Indiana’s big numbers come as a team. The Pacers led the league with 123.3 points a game, sixth-highest in league history, and also were tops in field-goal percentage and assists. They reached 140 points 11 times, an NBA record.
The sixth-seeded Pacers haven’t slowed down too much in the playoffs. They averaged 113 while knocking off No. 3 Milwaukee and reached at least 120 in all four victories during the six-game series.
The Knicks and Pacers met three straight times from 1993-95 – exchanging Game 7 victories in the latter two – then again from 1998-2000, with the last two of those in the Eastern Conference finals. Indiana won the most recent meeting, ousting the No. 2-seeded Knicks in the 2013 East semi-finals.
Neither team ever reached 120 points in any of the 41 games.
“It’s just a very intense matchup, that’s really the simple truth about it,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said. “There’s a lot of stuff with Reggie Miller for five or six years and I know in 2013 there was another matchup. We’re going to have to be very resilient and we’re going to have to be very together.”
EX-RAPTOR VS. EX-RAPTOR
Pascal Siakam and OG Anunoby were starters in Toronto to begin the season before the forwards were traded, with Anunoby going to the Knicks in December and Siakam to Indiana in January. The Knicks are 24-5 with Anunoby in the lineup and may need him now to defend his former teammate, who opened the playoffs with consecutive games of at least 35 points and 10 rebounds.