The New York Knicks beat the Philadelphia 76ers 108-94 on Friday, then spent the rest of the night feeding a familiar kind of buzz: the kind that starts with a dominant win and quickly turns into championship talk. Robert Griffin III posted on X that this might be the year the Knicks win an NBA title for the first time since 1973, and the replies came fast, sharp and skeptical.
Fans pushed back with lines like, “They won’t get past Detroit,” and “Do the Pistons not exist???,” while others leaned into the hope. One wrote, “You just prescribed 5 Knicks fans with a lethal dose of hopium,” and another added, “I hope so. Please lord let this year be our year. This city need it.” Griffin’s post captured the mood around a team that has moved into the spring as one of the league’s loudest stories.
The Knicks entered Sunday’s Game 4 in Philadelphia with a 3-0 series lead and a chance to move within a win of a second straight trip to the Eastern Conference Finals. They have won six straight playoff games by an average of 25.8 points per game, a run that has made them look every bit like a team built to survive a long postseason. The club is led by first-year coach Mike Brown, Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, and the current surge has only sharpened the conversation about how far this group can go.
Brown was hired after the Knicks moved on from Tom Thibodeau following last year’s trip to the Eastern Conference Finals, with the new coach brought in to push a more player-focused, pace-and-space offense. He arrives with the résumé of a former two-time NBA Coach of the Year and a career winning percentage of 60%, and he has inherited a roster that looks far more fluid than the one it replaced.
The biggest question for New York may be how much of the load falls on OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart. Anunoby missed Game 3 with a mild hamstring strain, and when he has been on the floor during the 2026 playoffs, he has looked like a difference-maker, averaging 21.8 points per game while shooting 61.9% from the field and 53.8% from three-point range. One fan put the challenge plainly: “Have you not seen the alien the Spurs got? What’s Towns gonna do with that?” Another argued, “If Bridges can shoot the rock at the clip he has been and with OG coming back. Would be a hard team to beat for sure.”
That is why the Knicks’ title conversation is real even if it is premature. They have not won a championship since 1973, and team chairman James Dolan has said the standard should be the NBA Finals and the trophy at the end of it. The Eastern Conference path is still full of resistance, and the roster still needs to stay healthy, but the Knicks have already done the part that matters most in May: they have made the rest of the league have to take them seriously.
For Stephen A. Smith, and for a city that measures hope in scars as much as in wins, this is the kind of Knicks run that forces everyone to look again. The last step is the one New York has been waiting on for more than half a century.
