This managed to pass me by because other than the Celtics, I haven't been watching any of the games but merely just looking at the box scores. I kind of have a chip on my shoulder towards New York teams just generally speaking because of the attitude of fans from there, so I didn't even look at how the Knicks were doing, but apparently during game 6 vs. the Atlanta Hawks the Knicks set an all time record for a margin of victory in an NBA playoffs game.
At first glance I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me or that someone had made a mistake on the box score but nope, that is the real final score right here and that is really something else.
I went and watched some of the highlights and they are pretty shocking for Atlanta. Atlanta is a pretty good team but they weren't on this day. This wasn't a victory, this was an absolute beatdown.
Now in the headline of this I said it was the largest beatdown of all time and that is not entirely true. It is one of the largest margins of victory. It is the 5th highest ever. It wasn't really meant to be clickbait but I suppose it could be seen as such. However, we shouldn't dismiss the historic nature of this sort of occurance because the NBA has been around for nearly 80 years.
Most of the biggest margins of victory have happened in the past 15 years though and if you have been a fan of the NBA for some time you will already know that games are simply a lot higher scoring now than they used to be. There are several reasons for this and some of them aren't good such as officials being extremely lax on traveling calls in such a way that it is often really cringe to watch. I do know that when I was a kid it was actually kind of rare for either team to get 100 points, these days the opposite is true.
But regardless of how it happens, everyone is playing by the same rules and now 4 of the top 5 margins of victory in the playoffs have been set in the past 15 years with 3 of them happening in the past 2 years including this one where the Knicks won by 51 points.
Since I am older and don't necessarily like the evolution of the sport in modern times I am really happy that the single largest victory in NBA playoffs was from 1973 where the Lakers defeated the Warriors by 58 points.
This very one-sided victory on the part of the Knicks would indicate that the Hawks are just a terrible team but that is not the case. They did win 2 of the 6 games that were played in that series after all but it was by a single point in both instances. In fact, the Hawks were at one point winning the series 2 games to 1. But then the Knicks truly figured the game out winning the next 3 by 16 points, 29 points and of of course the last one where they won by 51 points.
The Knicks are going to end up playing either my Celtics or the 76ers next and we'll just have to see how close those games are. On paper Boston is a better team than both the Knicks or the 76ers but things change in the playoffs as we have seen many times in the past. At the moment the Celtics are really struggling with Philly and that series really should have been a pushover if statistics mean anything at all.
I hope it's the Celtics but I have a sort of pessimistic outlook as far as that team is concerned as they seem to "drop the ball" on a regular basis when it matters the most.
One last thing that is noteworthy about this game between Atlanta and NY that is worth mentioning is that the Knicks were ahead by 47 points at halftime. This actually IS the highest lead that any team has ever had in a playoff game at halftime in the history of the NBA.