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For most of Game 1, the Cleveland Cavaliers looked like they were on the verge of stealing home court advantage in the Eastern Conference Finals against the New York Knicks. They were up 22 points with as little as seven minutes, 40 seconds left in the game, but Jalen Brunson led the Knicks on a 44-11 run to win the game in overtime, 115-104. It was New York’s eighth straight win, its longest postseason winning streak in franchise history.
The Knicks will hope to take a commanding 2-0 lead tonight at 8:10 p.m. ET before the series shifts to Cleveland for Game 3. With the Western Conference Finals shaping up to be a long, physical battle, a quick New York win in the East could give it a major advantage headed into the NBA Finals.
Both teams have completely clean injury reports.
The Knicks are 6.5-point favorites at DraftKings Sportsbook (-245 on the Moneyline), with the point total set to 215.5. The Cavaliers are +200 on the Moneyline. Below, I’ve broken down my three favorite prop bets from tonight’s highly-anticipated affair.
New York’s captain looked like he was going to fall short of this mark, as he had just 21 points through the end of the third quarter, but in the closing frame, he did what he does best, scoring 15 points on seven-for-nine shooting. Down the stretch, Brunson relentlessly hunted James Harden, earning that matchup for 19 partial possessions and scoring 17 points on eight-for-12 shooting in such situations. Still, whether or not Cleveland can prevent him from doing the same in Game 2 matters little; he’s going to get to his spots anyway, as he’s had 30 or more points in four of his last seven games and arguably could’ve gotten there in either of the closeout games had the score not been so lopsided.
The Cavaliers simply aren’t built to stop Brunson. Their back-court is small and defensively limited, with six-foot-two Donovan Mitchell ranking in just the fifth percentile during the regular season in close shots per 100 possessions and six-foot-five Harden being, well, Harden. Dean Wade was immensely successful against Brunson during the regular season, limiting him to one-for-15 shooting, but he was slightly less effective in Game 1, and Cleveland might need him to go bother the lengthier Mikal Bridges (18 points on seven-for-11 shooting while predominantly being guarded by Mitchell) instead. In general, I’m not a big believer in the Cavaliers’ defense, which ranked just 18th in defensive rating after acquiring Harden at the trade deadline.
Despite the all-around disaster that was Harden’s Game 1, he was unafraid to fire away from deep, attempting eight three-pointers for the seventh time these playoffs. Although he hit just one, he has enough of an overall shooting track record to suggest that he’ll bounce back, given that he shot 43.5% from deep after being traded to Cleveland in 24 of his 41 games between the regular season and the playoffs. He enjoyed some respectable shooting during the second round, going 14-for-34 (41.2%) between Games 3 and 6, so I know that he doesn’t completely disappear during the playoffs.
The Knicks are a good matchup for opposing three-point shooters. Because they’ve done such an excellent job locking down the paint these playoffs, with Karl-Anthony Towns playing the best defense of his career, opponents have been incentivized to shoot threes. In Game 1, the Cavaliers attempted just 24 restricted-area shots, the second-fewest among conference finals participants, but they did take 50 three-pointers, including 24 wide-open threes. Harden went zero-for-two on fully uncontested shots and one-for-three on shots with the nearest defender between four and six feet away during Game 1, but during the regular season, he shot 39.7% on open shots and 41.1% on wide-open shots, so his shooting should normalize in Game 2.
Bridges has found himself the subject of plenty of consternation for New York fans over his two-season tenure, given the cost of his acquisition, but he’s demonstrated why the Knicks paid such a hefty price for him in his last six games, averaging 18.7 points and 1.5 steals per game on 67-47-100 shooting splits across that span. He’s recorded two or more steals in three consecutive games, his third-longest streak of multi-steal games this season, and his second steal in Game 1 helped ice the game with a seven-point lead and just over a minute on the clock. New York will continue to need him as the primary defender on Harden.
Cleveland has had lots of turnover issues these playoffs, and though that’s partially a function of the teams it played — the Toronto Raptors ranked 11th in steals per game during the regular season and the Detroit Pistons first — ranking second-to-last in opponent steals per game is objectively bad, regardless of the opponent. The Cavaliers lost the turnover battle in Game 1, coughing up 21 turnovers to the Knicks’ 19, and they also lost it in two of the teams’ three regular-season matchups. Bridges had at least two steals in all three of the games while predominantly guarding Mitchell, who turned the ball over at a rate 4.2 percentage points less frequently than Harden this regular season.
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