Did postseason luck factor into the Knicks dominant playoff run?
Yahoo Sports NBA contributing writer Tom Haberstroh and senior NBA writer Dan Devine dive into the analytics and wonder if the Knicks were really this good, or did they get an usual amount of lucky bounces along the way?Check out the full conversation on “The Big Number” and subscribe on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , YouTube or wherever you listen .
Video Transcript
Plus 0.13 is the Knicks synergy shot-making score in the 2026 playoffs.
synergy shot-making, a metric created by the folks at Synergy Sports Technology, makes sense, to measure whether someone is scoring more or fewer points per shot than a league average shooter would on the same type of shot, right?
So the general idea is like are you fig- are you shooting hotter than expected or colder than expected?
And it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily have all of the bells and whistles of like guaranteeing the, you know, specific wh- which shooter and which defender and what the distance of the closeout is like.
Right, right.
It doesn't have all of the- Is it are you luck with the tracking unit?
Yeah basically a shot luck metric, right?
According to Synergy's tracking, the Knicks' attempts in this postseason would be expected to produce 1.05 points per shot.
They have instead produced 1.18 points per shot, hence zero, .1, plus 0.13.
That gap between expectation and reality is the highest of any postseason team since the aforementioned 2016-'17 Cavaliers, the LeBron team that went- 12 and one in the East on the way to the fl- to the finals before losing to that year one KD Warriors squad.
Huh.
And it's tied for the s- it's tied for second, and this is the second-largest gap with the 2013-'14 Miami Heat, another LeBron team that, it went in, in Synergy's database, which goes back to 2004.
So we are seeing in the last 20-odd years, one of the biggest gaps between expected shot-making and actual shot-making when it comes to these Knicks.
So two things about that.
One, Kenny Atkinson vindicated, in terms of talking about- analytically maybe the Cavs are actually still up in this series.
and then number two, how much of this do you think is the Knicks are a really good shot-making team, and how much is the coin is landing on heads a hell of a lot right now for a team on an absolute heater?
