GREENBURGH, N.Y. — The New York Knicks are on a historic run in this year’s NBA playoffs.
They still need to win one more round to go down as an all-time great team.
If they can get four more wins — and get them quickly — they would take their place up near the Los Angeles Lakers of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal or the Golden State Warriors of Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, among the NBA’s dominant postseason powerhouses.
If they fall to the Western Conference champion — the Oklahoma City Thunder and the San Antonio Spurs are headed for Game 7 to settle their series Saturday night — in the NBA Finals that tip off next week, they risk being remembered as a team that feasted on a weak Eastern Conference, that won a bunch of games right up until the ones that mattered most.
The third-seeded Knicks returned to practice Thursday for the first time since completing a sweep of the fourth-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference title series Monday night, vowing to continue ignoring any type of noise, whether it’s how great they have been or that their opponents were not very good.