The Knicks Made A Delicious Meal Out Of James Harden

Can you call a team that has advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals "unserious"? I'm honestly not sure, but it's very difficult to find another descriptor for the Cleveland Cavaliers the morning after they blew a 22-point fourth-quarter lead in Game 1 against the Knicks. It's not just that they blew it, but how they blew it.

The Knicks won the game in overtime, 115-104, while playing about 16 total minutes of good basketball. Both teams started terribly, but New York led 23-16 after the first quarter. From that point until the 7:39 mark of the fourth quarter, the Cavs outscored the Knicks 77-48. I can see you doing some quick math in your head, and yes, it's true: that means that for the rest of the game the Cavs got beat 44-11.

How does a thing like that happen? Well, as we have learned many times before, it helps to have James Harden around to pick on. Harden followed up one of his vintage no-shows in Game 7 of the Pistons series with another stupefying performance that was difficult to watch for empathetic types, but delicious for those of us with a hater's heart. Harden and Donovan Mitchell combined to go 1-10 for three points over the game's final 13 minutes, but Mitchell at least had scored 29 up to that point. Harden would finish the game with 15 points and six turnovers while shooting 31 percent from the floor.

And yet it wasn't even all those clanked clutch-time jumpers that did the Cavaliers in. It was Harden's defense, which was built on some of the most pathetic effort I've ever seen in a playoff game. At some point the Knicks theorized that if they just got Harden switched onto Jalen Brunson on every possession and let their star scoring guard isolate against the beleaguered sweatball, they would score every time. They were correct: Harden was put into eight isolations during the fourth quarter, and the Knicks scored 1.88 points per possession on those plays.

That is a very bad number for Harden, and one that reflects the effort he was putting into those possessions. Every time Brunson came down the court he would get Harden on an island, scoot right past him with a rudimentary crossover, and score. These were hugely important possessions for both the Cavs' season and Harden's career, and he couldn't be bothered to defend much harder than a guy on his fifth run at L.A. Fitness. "It was no secret we were attacking Harden," said Knicks coach Mike Brown after the game.

It may have somehow been a secret to Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson. It seems likely that if he had called a timeout at any point during the Knicks' 30-8 fourth-quarter run and replaced Harden with anyone else—Dennis Schröder, Keon Ellis, his own grandmother—the Cavs would have held on. Instead, he decided to just stand there and watch the thing we've all seen happen many, many times before happen again. Kenny: that's bozo behavior.

For as much as this game was about Harden and the Cavs collapsing, it was also about the Knicks' brilliance. Even as the comeback was happening, it didn't feel like the Knicks had ratcheted up the intensity or discovered a new well of determination. They just kept doing the same thing they've been doing throughout their dominant playoff run, and that was good enough to earn them a historic comeback win. In hindsight, the 37 minutes of rough basketball the Knicks played in this one feels less like a cause for concern and more like evidence that this team is good enough to let an opponent have some fun before reeling them in. The Knicks haven't lost since Game 3 of the first round, and seven of their last eight wins have had a double-digit margin. Sometimes a playoff team receives the mandate of heaven, and it looks an awful lot like this.