7 hours ago 3

Knicks vs. Pacers: Who wins the East? Series keys, schedule and prediction for epic battle of bitter rivals

The Eastern Conference’s No. 3 seed, the New York Knicks (51-31), will take on the No. 4-seed Indiana Pacers (50-32) in the Eastern Conference finals, the third round of the 2025 NBA playoffs. It’s a rematch of last season’s Eastern Conference semifinals, which the Pacers won in seven games.

It’s also the ninth time that New York and Indiana have met in the postseason since 1993. The Pacers have won five of the eight previous matchups.

Spike Lee’s still sitting courtside. Reggie Miller will be on the call. Tyrese Haliburton vs. Jalen Brunson is literally the culmination of a WWE storyline. The past is never dead; it’s not even past.

What we know about the Knicks

They were completely unable to beat the best teams in the NBA … until they weren’t.

New York had been middling for months: 28-21 after Jan. 1, with the NBA’s No. 14 offense and No. 16 defense in that span, needing six knife-fight-in-the-mud games to get past the precocious Pistons in an at-times-wobbly opening-round victory. Heading into the conference semis against a Celtics team that had swept them during the regular season, I (and many others) expected a short series.

“If [head coach Tom] Thibodeau can’t come up with an out-of-left-field method of forcing the Celtics to play left-handed,” I wrote in our series preview, “it’s tough to see the postseason matchup unfolding much differently than the regular-season edition.”

And then Thibs told his guys to start switching, and the Celtics started short-circuiting from long range, and Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges came up with a couple of massive fourth quarters … and, before you knew it, the Knicks were up 3-1, and Boston’s best player was out for the season.

Reality can shift with staggering speed in the NBA playoffs, and after a dominant series-clinching victory that saw Brunson, Bridges, Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby all top 20 points for the third time this postseason — a first for any foursome in NBA playoff history, according to Justin Kubatko of Statitudes — the Knicks now find themselves with a golden opportunity: Win your home games, and you’re in the NBA Finals.

That’s easier said than done, facing a Pacers team that has gone 4-1 on the road through two rounds and has been red-hot for months. But New York is playing past mid-May for the first time in 25 years, with a real chance to win the NBA championship, and has just put together two performances — Games 4 and 6 against the C’s, at home — that might’ve been its best all season, and that pointed toward a significantly higher ceiling than those middling last few months.

The Knicks’ biggest bets are all paying off at exactly the right time. Might as well let it ride and see just how far this reality shift can take them.

What we know about the Pacers

They’re still one of the NBA’s hardest-charging outfits, playing at the postseason’s third-fastest pace — behind only Memphis and Oklahoma City, who played one another — and scoring more points per playoff possession than any other team in the final four behind arguably the league’s most balanced attack. Six Pacers — starters Haliburton, Pascal Siakam, Myles Turner, Aaron Nesmith and Andrew Nembhard, plus reserve guard Bennedict Mathurin — averaged at least 10 points per game on 50% shooting in the second round; according to Kubatko, that ties the NBA record for the most such players in a single series.

This season, though, that balance extends to the defensive end, where Indiana ranks seventh in points allowed per possession over the past five-plus months. Nembhard and Nesmith are incredible and physical at the point of attack. Turner leads the postseason in blocks. And the Pacers’ remarkable depth — 11 players averaging at least nine minutes per game in this postseason, with nobody over Haliburton’s 34.1 — allows head coach Rick Carlisle to employ a full-court press more frequently and hellaciously than any other team in the NBA. (Here’s an easy prediction: Brunson is going to see more backcourt pressure in this series than he did against Detroit … and he saw a ton of it against Detroit.)

The combination of pedal-to-the-metal pace, defensive steel, high-quality marksmanship in both the backcourt and frontcourt — Indiana leads the playoff field in effective field goal percentage, shooting 50.1% from the field, 40.6% from 3-point land and 79.5% from the free-throw line as a team — and bona fide All-NBA-level play from Haliburton and Siakam has made Indiana one of the best teams in the NBA for months. As my podcast partner Tom Haberstroh noted on last week’s episode of The Big Number, the Pacers are 42-16 since Jan. 1 — a .724 winning percentage that translates to a 59-win pace over a full 82-game slate, and that includes their 8-2 run through Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks and Donovan Mitchell’s top-seeded Cavaliers.

Skeptics will point to the Pacers once again benefitting from unfortunate injuries — Damian Lillard’s ruptured Achilles, the myriad maladies that befell the Cavs — as reason to look askance at their championship candidacy. (That’s what skeptics do; that’s why their eyebrows always look like that.) Those willing to enter Round 3 with an open mind, though, might see a team that plays beautiful offense, tenacious defense and smart situational basketball — and, before long, find themselves turning into believers that this could be the first Pacers team to go the distance since before the franchise joined the NBA.

Head-to-head

The Knicks won the regular season series, 2-1, posting two of their 15 most efficient offensive games of the season in their wins — which, conversely, ranked as Indiana’s sixth and seventh-worst defensive games of the campaign.

The first: a 123-98 blowout all the way back in October, in both teams’ second outing of the new campaign. As was the case in Game 6 against Boston, New York featured a balanced attack, with Brunson, Towns, Bridges and Hart all scoring 20 or more points:

The Pacers, on the other hand, struggled mightily on offense, shooting just 3 for 30 from 3-point range as a team with Haliburton going scoreless on 0-for-8 shooting in the loss. According to John Hollinger's Game Score metric, which aims to give a rough estimate of how productive a particular player was in a particular game (sort of like single-game PER), it was the All-NBA point guard’s worst game of the year.

He’d return serve a couple of weeks later, though, exploding for 35 points on 11-for-18 shooting with 14 assists against just two turnovers in a 132-121 Pacers win at Gainbridge Fieldhouse — his third-best performance of the season. Brunson and Towns both got theirs, too, combining for 63 points on 36 field-goal attempts, but that wasn’t enough to overcome 73 points from Haliburton and Mathurin, who popped for a career-high 38:

Indiana and New York wouldn’t meet again until after the trade deadline, with the Knicks taking the rubber match — and, as it would turn out, home-court advantage in a playoff series between two teams separated by just one game in the standings — 128-115 behind 40 points, 12 rebounds and 5 assists from Towns.

Your mileage may vary on how much we can take from those three matchups. New York’s first win came during the Pacers’ — and, chiefly, Haliburton’s — rocky start to the season. Neither Nembhard nor Nesmith were in the lineup for Indiana’s lone victory, which saw extended minutes for Ben Sheppard and Jarace Walker, who played a combined 91 minutes against the Cavs in Round 2.

KAT’s 40-point season-series-capper came with Indiana missing primary rim protector Turner, who was out with a cervical strain sustained in a collision with Mathurin. It also came with Anunoby sidelined by a right foot sprain, replaced in the starting lineup by Precious Achiuwa. Mitchell Robinson, who played such a huge role in Round 2 against Boston, didn’t play a second against Indiana during the regular season (and, for that matter, only played in one of the seven games against the Pacers during last spring’s playoff series).

One thing we probably can infer based on the data and film, though: The Pacers have to get a handle on Brunson, who averaged 29.7 points per game against them in last year’s playoffs (including a Game 7 in which he left early after breaking his shooting hand). His individual numbers were less gaudy during the regular-season series — 22.3 points and 7.3 assists in 31.1 minutes per game — but his impact was not: New York outscored Indiana by 19 points per 100 possessions with its captain on the floor.

Indiana’s search for that handle brings us to another question …

Matchup to watch

Who guards KAT?

During the regular season, the answer, mostly, was the Pacers’ centers — Turner in the first two meetings, and reserve Thomas Bryant in the third, with Turner sidelined. And that answer, mostly, was not good enough:

Putting a center on KAT — even a defender as big and good as Turner — opens your defense up to a world of hurt: the hard-to-handle drives with which Towns punished Al Horford last round; New York feasting on off-ball cuts and slashes to the paint with your best rim protector lifted out of the lane; the Knicks dusting off the Brunson-Towns two-man game that was so dominant early in the season. The efficacy — and, more important, frequency — of that pick-and-roll waned considerably in the second half of the season, once opponents wised up and started cross-matching to guard Towns with wings, as Detroit (Tobias Harris) and Boston (Jrue Holiday) largely did in the last two rounds, so that their centers could guard Hart, treat him like a non-shooter, and sag off of him on the perimeter in favor of loading up on Brunson, clogging the paint, and mucking up New York’s driving and cutting lanes.

Replicating that sort of strategy might be a little trickier for the Pacers, though. Put Turner on Hart, and who’s the wing guarding Towns? Is it Siakam? Then someone will need to guard Anunoby, who’s been a bit feast-or-famine this postseason — six games of 20 or more, five games of 10 or fewer — but who can post up and mash a mismatch against a smaller defender if you give it to him.

The best choice is probably Nesmith — 6-foot-6 and 215 pounds with a 6-foot-10 wingspan, built like a defensive end, with an ever-revving motor and a mean streak to match. The problem there is that, while Nembhard is Indiana’s top option against the best guard on virtually every team the Pacers play — he had the toughest average matchup difficulty of any defender in the NBA this season, according to The BBall Index — he’s not necessarily the best option against Brunson, who torched him to the tune of 67 points on 26-for-39 shooting (66.7%) in last year’s second-round matchup, according to NBA Advanced Stats’ matchup data.

Brunson had a much tougher time against the bigger, stronger Nesmith, who was better equipped to absorb the punishment that Brunson doles out on drives to the basket, deliver some of his own, and force the Knicks point guard into arrhythmic dribbles or off-target passes. He shot 27-for-60 from the field (45%) against Nesmith, with more turnovers (seven) than assists (five) when they matched up. (Moving Nesmith onto Brunson also allows Nembhard to be more opportunistic, looking to muck things up as a help defender.) So if Job No. 1 is finding a way to slow down Brunson, then Nesmith might be Carlisle’s man … except that leaves Nembhard and Haliburton to guard Towns and Bridges, and I’m not sure that’s where Carlisle will want to wind up.

Would he shift the other way — trusting Turner to just play better on KAT, working to navigate the traffic at the level of the screen, while putting Nesmith on Brunson, Nembhard on Bridges, Siakam on OG, and sliding Haliburton over to “hide” on Hart? Does that risk endangering Haliburton too much by having Hart drag him into actions, or risk Hart wreaking havoc by marching straight to the offensive glass whenever Haliburton leaves him to play a passing lane?

Carlisle has had a ton of time to review the tape and consider his options; Thibodeau will have had nearly as much time to think about how he’ll adjust to whichever path Carlisle chooses. (Like, say, feeding Towns a steady diet of post touches against Nesmith, seeing if he can draw a double, and seeing what that might open up elsewhere for New York’s offense.) Whichever path that winds up being, if Towns is able to repeat his regular-season production against the Pacers — 30.3 points per game, his second-highest average against any opponent, shooting a scorching 56.6% from the field, 46.7% from 3-point range and 88.9% from the foul line — Indiana’s chances probably plummet.

Crunch-time lineups

New York Knicks

Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before: Thibs is probably going to lean heavily, if not entirely, on Brunson, Towns, Hart, Bridges and Anunoby. That lineup played more minutes than any other five-man grouping in the NBA during the regular season and more than any unit outside of Denver through the first two rounds, including a league-high 42 fourth-quarter minutes. They also make up half of the top 10 in “clutch” player minutes in the postseason, with Bridges and Anunoby running first and second.

On one hand, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that Thibodeau shouldn’t rely quite so much on that quintet. Across more than 1,200 minutes since opening night, they’ve only outscored opponents by 55 total points — just 1.2 points per 100 possessions. Since Jan. 1, including two playoff rounds, they’ve actually been outscored by 30 over 645 minutes — an unsightly net rating of minus-3.1 points-per-100.

On the other hand: The Knicks’ starters are plus-36 in 183 regular- and postseason fourth-quarter minutes, routinely outperforming Detroit and Boston in the final frame. Brunson is the shot-creation engine, nearly impossible to pin down, smoke wafting through clenched fingers. Towns spaces the floor, cleans the boards and offers secondary punch. Bridges, Anunoby and Hart fill in the rest of the (numerous) gaps.

They’re Thibodeau’s most dependable blend of shooting, perimeter defense, rebounding, toughness and physicality, and they’ve gotten him this far. He might stick with Robinson or Deuce McBride for a spell if they’re running hot, tilting the possession game or banging 3s, respectively, but it’s a pretty safe bet that when it matters, Thibs will continue to stick with the five he trusts most.

Indiana Pacers

Nembhard, Turner, Siakam, Nesmith and Haliburton lead Indiana in fourth-quarter minutes during the postseason. They’ve played nearly all of Indiana’s “clutch” minutes — defined by NBA Advanced Stats as when the score is within five points in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime. They have outscored their opposition by 31 points in 37 final-frame minutes, the second-best mark of any lineup in the 2025 playoffs.

Carlisle has alternate options if he needs them: T.J. McConnell for point-of-attack pressure and an extra ball-handler, Sheppard for a bit more size on the perimeter, Obi Toppin for some more offensive juice, Walker for more mobility and versatility up front, etc. For the most part, though, expect the über-experienced and championship-seasoned head coach to hew to a time-honored principle: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Prediction: Pacers in 6

I think the Knicks’ core group can reach a higher ceiling than Indiana’s, but I feel more confident in how consistently the Pacers can play above their floor — in how readily Haliburton will generate good shots (often by targeting Towns in the pick-and-roll), in how the persistent ball pressure will weigh on Brunson and/or force the ball into the hands of less capable initiators, in Siakam’s metronomic production as a primary scorer/second banana, in Nembhard and Nesmith continuing to make deflating jumpers, and in a Pacers reserve corps that plays with maximum effort for maximum impact.

If the version of the Knicks that showed up in the second half of Game 4 and for all of Game 6 against Boston is the one we get for this full series, then New York’s going to the Finals. The second they slip up, though, Indiana will pounce … and that’s all it takes to lose home-court advantage, and with it, maybe, the series.