The kinks that are transformed by the fight with pistons see steel against Celtics

Athletic has the live report on game 3 between the Celtics and Knicks in the NBA playoffs 2025.

Boston – Cameron Payne summarized the mood in four words.

The New York Knicks Guard was sitting on his locker after the first of two unlikely takedowns in Boston. He lended himself to the knees to get elbows on his knees, with the exhausted grin of someone who had just emerged as the winner through an unexpected fight.

“Thank God for Detroit,” he didn't joke anyone.

Payne laughed. Mikal Bridges and Miles “Deice” McBride, who sits on both sides of Payne, giggled with him. Everyone in Payne's surroundings knew what he meant.

Payne lives in a joke. This was no different, a joking reference to a highly competitive series in the first round against the pistons, in which both teams stopped, to forget how to dribble, how to shoot and how to pass a basketball. A middle of the truth can hide in humor.

Each of these six Detroit surfaces came to the wire, some for the final possession. Game 1 of the second round of the Knicks against the Boston Celtics, as Payne alluded, was another terrible experience: Missing 3S, a wasteful of 20 points and enough grit to fill a Tom Thibodeau fever dream. And it ended with another victory in New York, this in extra time.

The pistons could have been a young team with 44 victories. Something, regardless of whether you want to call it psychology or discipline or toughness, will be reused with Detroit during this six-game slugfest.

Two days after Payne's comment, the Knicks again faced the same episode against the Celtics:

They fell exactly 20 points on the street with a few minutes in the third quarter. They hurried back when the Celtics missed the 25 percent shooting from Deep Jumper to Jumper. And they used stubborn bridges to snap the basketball away from an all-star wing and to seal the victory of a one-people game.

Now a team, whose fortitude was once a question, has one that went against the defending champions against the defending champions during the regular season against the two best seeds of the Eastern Conference around 0: 8.

“We went through a lot of fire,” said McBride. “And we go through together.”

This type of victory was not part of the identity of the Knicks in the off -season, but the playoffs either reveal their mistakes or force them to develop.

Six consecutive New York games that go back to the third against the Pistons are due to the final possession. It is also not the case that the first couple against Detroit was simple. The Knicks had the chance to bind game 2 with less than a minute, but Bridges sounded a jumper and lost them. In the meantime, the pistons led in the fourth quarter of game 1 with eight points, only so that the Knicks scored a 21-0 run to win it.

These were not just close games against the pistons. They were free. Defender brutalized dribbler. Screener acted as if they were wearing armor. Fouls were no longer fouls. The lack of physicality of the Knicks was her biggest mistake during the season. It is no longer a problem if you fight the Celtics.

It is as if the pistons would hit them. And it is as if mental strength had accumulated from there.

The Knicks have a model when they grow up, just like they have twice against Boston.

During the interruptions, they remember chaos that is now their world, as they have survived for weeks.

“We have been here before,” they tell us how bridges explained.

Bridges said when the Knicks game 2 had in temples, he said teammates during the time crossing that he was “pretty sure that we would win this game.” After Bridges had become goalless in the first three quarters, he scored 14 points in the fourth 14 points and stamped an excitement about the greatest defensive game of the New York season.

In game 1 it was the attack of Jaylen Brown in Summer. In game 2 it was overturning from Jayson Tatum when the clock had expired.

“You can look at all eyes and it's not a stressed look,” said Bridges. “It's a bit like a confident look, knowing, okay, let's see how much time is left and just take it one piece after the other.”

The Knicks mastered their greeting. At least against the Celtics you configured these comebacks.

All evidence indicates that the kinks would come through the starting pistons, but would fall in Boston. And no, this was not just a feeling that was awarded to the organization of the supposedly poisonous media machine. Various people in the Knicks realized that the team was imperfect.

The Knicks started the year with a powerful crime that lost the steam in the second half. When spring approached, their problems against the Elite competition only seemed to compile.

The Knicks had the chance to redeem themselves against the best teams in the Eastern Conference shortly after the All Star break. Instead, the nightmarish weekend came about 37-point drubbing through the Cleveland Cavaliers on a Friday and a blow of the Celtics on a Sunday when Boston started up to 27.

Another opportunity against these two appeared in April, this time in Madison Square Garden. Again you did not pass the test. With less than a week of the season, they missed an 11-point advantage and fell to the Celtics in the extension. Three days later they went 23 on the Cavs and then lost.

The Knicks don't play as stylistically. Thibodeau has revised her basic defense against Boston. The strategy works. But beyond the X and Os, a formerly questionable group has taken up more blows when it was awarded for the following after the other after the following. It remained the last one in six of them and is now two victories from the conference finale.

Scars build the character, even if they form in the first round.

(Top photo: Maddie Meyer / Getty)