BOSTON — It took a sizable Knicks contingent roughly 44 minutes of game time to take over the TD Garden on Sunday, about a minute after Celtics fans darted for the exits with their tails between their legs following an embarrassing loss at the hands of a divisional rival.
Revenge is a dish best-served cold, and the best way to get over a tough loss is to hand your next opponent an even worse beat down.
The Knicks didn’t quite match the 38-point margin the East’s No. 1-seeded Detroit Pistons spotted them on Friday, but they made easy work of the Celtics for their ninth win of their last 10 games in a 111-89 victory at TD Garden on Super Bowl Sunday.
The 89 points were the fewest the Celtics’ high-octane offense has generated all season.
“Our group is resilient. Sometimes things like that happen in Detroit. None of us like it. None of us want to go through it,” head coach Mike Brown said after the victory, his team’s 34th of the season. “Give Detroit a lot of credit, but we know it’s not who we are. We played a lot better than that. We will. But I do think this group is resilient because they’ve shown time and time again after tough losses or multiple losses playing the next game usually doing a pretty good job of playing again.”
The Knicks now hold a 2-1 season series lead over the Celtics with a fourth and final regular season meeting at Madison Square Garden on April 9. If the playoffs began today, the Knicks would own the tiebreaker and thus the East’s No. 2 seed over the Celtics as both teams fight to make up ground with the conference-best Pistons.
Maybe Boston needs Jayson Tatum to return from his Achilles injury sooner than they’ve let on. The Celtics were also without noted sharpshooter Sam Hauser. Then again, the Knicks put on a dominant performance with OG Anunoby (right toe) and Miles McBride (core muscle surgery) out due to injury. McBride is expected to miss a significant amount of time. Plus Josh Hart played through an ankle injury, and Karl-Anthony Towns sported goggles last worn by Amar’e Stoudemire after taking an elbow to the face in Wednesday’s victory over the Denver Nuggets.
“Our starter group did a nice job defensively, and I take my hat off to everybody in that locker room,” said Brown. “Offensively, I thought we did a pretty good job of taking care of the basketball. It was big for us.”
After a miserable performance in Detroit — a 4-of-20 stinker against the Pistons’ hard-nosed defense — Jalen Brunson, in his typical fashion, immediately self-corrected: He scored 31 points on 12-of-21 shooting from the field and 4-of-8 shooting from downtown to go with eight assists on the night.
That is the Brunson special, the kind of bounce-back game he’s become good for given his off nights tend to be few and far between. The captain steered the Knicks to victory out of the opening gate, scoring or assisting on 23 of the Knicks’ 35 first-quarter points, posting 15 points and four assists in the opening frame as the Knicks took an 11-point lead into the second period and built a lead as large as 17. Hart scored 19 points on 50% shooting and Towns added 11 points and 10 rebounds in 29 minutes of action.
The newest Knick, Jose Alvarado, immediately made his presence felt with 12 points and two steals off the bench.
“He was great. The impact he had on the game right away was amazing,” said Brunson. “It’s what we needed. Excited to see him in the blue and orange.”
For the Celtics, Jaylen Brown scored 26 points but needed 25 shots to get there and only made 11. Payton Pritchard, Boston’s second-leading scorer entering the matinee, put up just six points on two-of-nine shooting from the field and one-of-six shooting from deep. Derrick White added 19 points on 50% shooting from the field, but the Celtics shot just 17% from three-point range as a team, making just seven of their 41 attempts from behind the arc.
“You get a guy like Jaylen Brown, who is a heck of a player. In the first half he was having his way with us a little bit. He was 6-for-11, he was rolling. In the second half we did a better job defensively as a team,” said Brown, who gave rookie Mohamed Diawara defensive player of the game honors on Sunday. “I got to give Mo some credit. We threw Mo on him for a little bit. We thought we were going to try to make Jaylen work, be physical, get up into him, stuff like that, and [Mo] did it without fouling. He did a nice job with it.
“So to see that from a young guy at this point in his career was a lot of fun as a staff. You’re not going to stop Jaylen Brown. He’ a great player. You just want to make him work and I thought Mo did a heck of a job making him work.”
A worthy note: Nikola Vucevic, who the Celtics acquired from the Chicago Bulls in the Anfernee Simons deal, scored 11 points off the bench but shot just one-of-six on clean looks from three-point range on Sunday. Those are the kinds of looks a player of Vucevic’s caliber as a two-time All-Star will make in the future.
“We were just connected on defense. They can get hot fast. They can make shots. Great pace. They have a lot of range and a lot of shooters. I think we just connected,” said Brunson. “We tried to make things as difficult as possible. But also a little luck. They missed a couple shots. We know that the team they have over there, we know we got to be ready.”
The Knicks will be tested by another capable center when they host the Indiana Pacers, who traded Bennedict Mathurin to the Los Angeles Clippers to Ivica Zubac ahead of the NBA Trade Deadline. They will then face Joel Embiid and the Philadelphia 76ers on the road in the second leg of a back-to-back on Wednesday entering the All-Star break.
