{"id":5075,"date":"2025-06-22T11:21:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T11:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/5075\/"},"modified":"2025-06-22T11:21:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T11:21:09","slug":"plucky-pacers-keep-raising-the-bar-for-knicks-coaching-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/5075\/","title":{"rendered":"Plucky Pacers keep raising the bar for Knicks’ coaching search"},"content":{"rendered":"

We knew the Knicks were fairly close under Tom Thibodeau. But this close? Nope.<\/p>\n

With each day the NBA Finals were extended by those plucky Pacers<\/a>, the bar shifted upward for the Knicks front office and their next coach.<\/p>\n

Because in retrospect, the Pacers, who eliminated the Knicks in the conference finals, are better than we imagined. They\u2019ve pushed the Thunder to the brink after most inside the NBA atmosphere \u2014 from pundits to talent evaluators to players \u2014 believed Indiana to be vastly inferior.<\/p>\n

The Thunder, after all, steamrolled the NBA to this point (except for the Nuggets), winning 68 games in the regular season before going 12-4 in the Western Conference playoff bracket. They have the MVP, the league\u2019s best defense, the advantage of youth and depth. They were supposed to pummel the Pacers with these tools, but Game 7 is now booked for Sunday because Indy curb stomped OKC in Thursday night\u2019s Game 6, 108-91. It\u2019ll be the first Game 7 of the NBA Finals since a 73-win team from Golden State was stunned at home by Kyrie Irving and LeBron James in 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We knew the Knicks were fairly close under Tom Thibodeau. But this close? Nope. With each day the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":5076,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[1267,6540,1260,3578,3579,3580,3122,62,2632,2225,6541,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-5075","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-indiana-pacers","9":"tag-leon-rose","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-nba-finals","12":"tag-nba-playoffs","13":"tag-nba-playoffs-2025","14":"tag-new-york-knicks","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-sports-columnists","17":"tag-sports-plus","18":"tag-tom-thibodeau","19":"tag-united-states","20":"tag-unitedstates","21":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114726757167450279","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5075"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5075\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}