yahoo - 5/18/2026 3:54:35 PM - GMT (+2 )
The 2026 NBA playoffs continue with the No. 3 seed, the New York Knicks, taking on the No. 4 seed, the Cleveland Cavaliers, in the Eastern Conference finals. These two teams last squared off in the postseason in 2022, when the Knicks earned their first playoff series victory of the Jalen Brunson era at Cleveland’s expense, drumming the Cavs out in five games in the opening round.
Schedule| Odds|Knicks breakdown| Cavs breakdown | Head-to-head| Matchup to watch|Key question| Prediction
Game 1: Tuesday at New York (8 p.m., ESPN)
Game 2: Thursday at New York (8 p.m., ESPN)
Game 3: Saturday at Cleveland (8 p.m., ABC)
Game 4: Monday, May 25, at Cleveland (8 p.m., ESPN)
*Game 5: Wednesday, May 27, at New York (8 p.m., ESPN)
*Game 6: Friday, May 29, at Cleveland (8 p.m., ESPN)
*Game 7: Sunday, May 31, at New York (8 p.m., ESPN)
*if necessary
New York Knicks (-270)
Cleveland Cavaliers (+215)
You can say they’ve become the team Knicks fans hoped they would, but that doesn’t really cover it. Because I’m not sure even the most cockeyed, orange-and-blue-Kool-Aid-chugging optimist could’ve hoped for this:
The Knicks entered the playoffs as a very good team: experienced and poised; 10-deep with players who can contribute; winners of 53 games (54, if you count the NBA Cup final) with a top-five net rating and top-seven units on bothsides of the ball. What they’ve been since fallingdown 2-1 against the Hawks in Round 1, though, is awesome in the 17th-century sense — a titanic two-way terror that has professionally and summarily chewed up and spat out its opposition to such a degree that it essentially had another All-Star break between the second and third rounds.
“It’s a long time,” Knicks forward Josh Hart told reporters after practice on Wednesday. “Obviously, it’s good for recovery, but mentally I’m watching the other games, just waiting to get back out there. It’s a little long.”
The Knicks earned that weeklong layoff by building on their historic closeout-game annihilation of the Hawks by keeping the pedal mashed to the floorboards against the 76ers. A 39-point beatdown in Game 1 and slugfest survival in Game 2 at Madison Square Garden; an emphatic 14-point win in Game 3, followed by a 30-point laugher in Game 4.
New York has won seven consecutive playoff games by a total of 185 points, scoring 1.29 points per possession outside of garbage time (and there’s been a lot of that lately) while shooting 54.8% from the field and 43.2% from 3-point range. Karl-Anthony Towns has been a revelation as a playmaking hub, averaging eight assists per game in this stretch and dominating opposing defenses while taking fewer than 10 shots a night. Working off the ball more often has made Jalen Brunson, already one of the most gifted scorers on the planet, an even tougher cover. Mikal Bridges has rediscovered both his confidence and the rim. A defense that’s been better than most people think for a lot longer than they realize — fourth in points allowed per possession since Christmas — has been snare-drum tight and on a string.
The sum total has been overwhelming: a championship-caliber outfit that returns to the conference finals fresher than last year’s model, with weeks’ worth of reason to believe that it is the best team on this side of the bracket. And, if it can keep this up, maybe on either side of the bracket.
That, while the path hasn’t exactly been smooth, there’s a bit more grit and gumption to this iteration of the Cavs than some folks might have thought. (It’s me. I’m “some folks.”)
After a strong finish to the regular season following the franchise-shifting trade of Darius Garland for James Harden — a 21-9 closing kick, fueled by the NBA’s No. 4 offense (and, if we’re being honest, a pretty friendly schedule) — the Cavs entered the playoffs as the East’s No. 4 seed, with what looked like a fairly favorable matchup in the offensively challenged Toronto Raptors. That turned into a fortnight in the pain cave, as Toronto’s switching, swarming defense ground the Cleveland offense into pulp, made Donovan Mitchell’s life miserable, forced James Harden into more than five turnovers a night and required off-the-bench heroics from Sam Merrill and Max Strus and the game of Jarrett Allen’s life to escape in seven.
The Cavs’ reward for surviving two weeks of grappling with the NBA’s No. 7 defense? Two more rolling on the mat with the league’s No. 2 defense. Thanks a lot, Adam Silver!
Cleveland struggled mightily from the outset, as the physical Pistons led for nearly the entirety of the first two games, with point-of-attack menace Ausar Thompson smothering Mitchell, Harden continuing to commit costly turnovers, and the Cavs unable to consistently get stops even in two-big lineups featuring both Allen and Evan Mobley. When the scene shifted back to Ohio, though, the Cavs got off the mat.
Mitchell scored 78 points in two games, including 39 in the second half of Game 4, tying an NBA postseason record for most points in a half. Mobley met Detroit’s force with renewed force of his own, controlling the paint on defense, becoming an offensive hub in the short roll and scoring seven points in the final two minutes of regulation to send Game 5 to overtime. Harden committed just five turnovers in 77 minutes, made threehugeshots in 63 seconds to help ice Game 3 and scored a team-high 30 in Game 5 to help deliver Cleveland’s first road win of the playoffs and push Detroit to the brink.
With a chance to finish the Pistons off at home, the Cavs blinked, shooting just 39% with more turnovers (20) than assists (15) as Detroit bulldozed them to level the series. It was the kind of spiritless and dispiriting performance that could’ve lingered, leading to a lifeless Game 7 … but the Cavs wouldn’t let it.
Mitchell controlled Game 7 from the opening tip, pressuring the rim to spoon-feed Mobley and Allen dunks to get them going on his way to a postseason-high eight assists. Merrill came off the bench firing, knocking down five 3s in 25 minutes. Mobley and Allen bossed Jalen Duren, Tobias Harris and Co. around, combining for 44 points on 24 shots, 19 rebounds, three steals and three blocks. The defense completely suffocated the Pistons’ wayward offense, holding superstar guard Cade Cunningham to 13 points on 5-for-16 shooting while also shutting off everybody else’s water in what will go down as one of the five worst offensive performances of Detroit’s season.
It was utter domination — a complete reversal of Game 6, a perfectly timed appearance of the best-case-scenario version of the roster that president of basketball operations Koby Altman put together, and a 31-point pummeling that sent the No. 1 seed home for the summer and propelled the Cavs onto New York and a chance to play for a spot in the NBA Finals.
The glass-half-empty take from surviving two nasty, gnarly, physical series just to make it to the conference finals — a first for Mitchell, Mobley and Allen, a return nine years in the making for Harden, a round no Cleveland team without LeBron James has seen in 35 years — is that the Cavs have taken a lot more hits than the Knicks have to get here. The glass-half-full view? They’ve now proven they can not only absorb those blows without buckling, but also fire back with enough force to win the fight.
That’s not something previous versions of the Cavs have been able to say; this one can. That toughness — plus a lot of offensive talent — has them four wins away from the Finals … and they’re going to need all of it against a Knicks team that’s absolutely surging right now.
The Knicks knocked the Cavs off on opening night, 119-111, in a game that effectively laid out the vision that head coach Mike Brown was brought on board to implement: faster pace, more ball and player movement, less wholly reliant on Brunson, and more intentionally leveraging the depth of the roster that team president Leon Rose had built:
Cleveland looked to be on its way to getting its lick back in the NBA’s Christmas Day matinee, taking a 17-point lead early in the fourth quarter at Madison Square Garden. But monster fourth quarters from Brunson (14 of his team-high 34 in the frame), veteran reserve Jordan Clarkson (nine of his 25 in 29 minutes off the bench) and second-year backup point guard Tyler Kolek (11 of his 16, plus a pair of assists and a huge strip on Mitchell with under two minutes to go) fueled a huge comeback as the Knicks snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in a 126-124 thriller:
The Cavs got on the board after the All-Star break, notching a convincing 109-94 win in Cleveland behind balanced offense — six players in double figures, led by Mitchell’s 23 — and a fantastic defensive effort that harried New York into 17 turnovers, 40.7% shooting from the field and just 95.5 points per 100 possessions prior to garbage time, which, according to Cleaning the Glass, was the Knicks’ fifth-worst offensive outing of the season.
Your standard injury/availability caveats apply. Hart and backup center Mitchell Robinson missed the season opener for New York, while key reserve guard Miles McBride missed both the Christmas Day win and the February loss. Max Strus, now a vital rotational cog playing more than half a game for Kenny Atkinson, missed all three meetings for Cleveland.
More notably, the Cavs played the Knicks just once after the midseason blockbuster to bring in Harden — and it was the game they won by 15 points. (Which, granted, was the Knicks’ third game in four nights. But still!)
Can the Cavs take away the Knicks’ Point KAT flow?
You’ve likely heard it a million times by now: The Knicks’ decision to reorient their offense around Towns’ playmaking midway through the Hawks series has completely changed their trajectory.
Playing through Towns at the top of the floor and from the elbows has allowed the Knicks to exploit the unique matchup advantages he provides, as a 7-foot knockdown 3-point marksman who can see over the defense and drop the ball in a bucket to a cutting teammate, and who also has a handle deft enough to drive past lumbering defenders, enough bulk to muscle through smaller ones, and a touch silky enough to finish all types of shots from all types of angles through contact on his way to the rim.
Put your center on Towns, and New York can tap into the Brunson-Towns pick-and-roll, generating pick-and-pop triples for Towns or opportunities for Brunson to flame-broil an overmatched opposing big in space. Put a smaller defender on him, and the Knicks are becoming increasingly comfortable finding ways to play out of the cross-match, whether by bringing their own wings (Hart, Bridges, OG Anunoby, McBride, even Landry Shamet and Jordan Clarkson) into the screening action to give Brunson a different vulnerable defender to try to exploit, or by letting Towns just pick out passes and dump the ball over the top of the smaller defender to cutters in the motion offense that has been so successful of late.
That plan of attack annihilated Atlanta and pummeled Philly, but Cleveland poses a different challenge. Mobley, the former Defensive Player of the Year, who served as Towns’ primary defender throughout the regular season, blends size, length, quickness, disruptive instincts and the ability to deploy them all in space at a rare level for a big man. And while most opponents with a top-flight defensive big to wield in this sort of matchup would have to sacrifice rim protection in doing so, the Cavs can let Mobley roam with Towns in space while still keeping Allen stationed close to the paint — especially if they slot him onto Hart, who shot 41.3% from 3-point range during the regular season, but who is battling injuries to both of his hands and missed 27 of his first 34 3-point tries this postseason before going 4-for-6 in the Game 4 closeout of the Sixers.
If Hart’s unable to make the Cavs pay for treating him like Ausar Thompson, and if Mobley’s able to stifle KAT’s high-post playmaking and pick-and-pop game, where will Brown turn? Is it a heavier dose of Brunson-ball — attempts to hunt Mitchell and Harden in the pick-and-roll or isolation, or to find the range against whichever wing defender Atkinson stations on him from the opening tip?
Dean Wade got the job in the February win, and acquitted himself well, but with his limited offensive game allowing the Pistons to all but ignore him on the offensive end, Atkinson decided to slide Strus into the starting five in Game 7. Strus held his own against Cunningham defensively and has the size, physicality and mentality to make Brunson work for every inch; Brunson’s postseason résumé is also littered with opponents who seemed like they could rough him up and take him out of his game, right up until he dropped 40 on them.
The Knicks have found plenty of playoff success these past couple of seasons behind that “give Brunson the ball and let God sort ’em out” style of approach, but it’s not what this team was built to be — not why they traded for Towns, not why they hired Brown, not why they put together the pieces they did. New York found the offensive identity it had been searching for against Atlanta and bludgeoned Philadelphia with it. If Cleveland can’t find a way to short-circuit it enough that the Knicks have to abandon it, the Cavs could find themselves on the receiving end of a similar offensive barrage, too.
How healthy is OG Anunoby, really?
Anunoby got off to a roaring start to the 2026 postseason. The ninth-year forward averaged 21.4 points, 7.5 rebounds and more than six combined steals, blocks and deflections per game through New York’s first six playoff games, while shooting a scorching 67% on 2-pointers, 53.8% on 3-pointers and 81% from the foul line.
His off-ball cutting, physicality finishing in the paint and dead-eye shot-making helped fuel New York’s surging offense. His ability to seamlessly switch between defending quicker guards, like-sized power forwards and bigger centers helped unlock the most versatile and vicious version of the Knicks’ defense. Anunoby has never been an All-Star, but he was playing at an All-NBA level; there weren’t more than a handful of players performing as well as he was to start the postseason.
And then, late in Game 2 against Philly, he pulled up:
Anunoby missed the finaltwo games of the Sixers series with a left hamstring strain — the type of injury that, depending on its severity, could keep a player on the sidelines for weeks. The initial reporting, though, suggested that Anunoby had avoided a serious strain, and Knicks head coach Mike Brown consistently referred to him as “day-to-day.”
While New York waited for its opponent, Anunoby returned to practice, and SNY’s Ian Begley and ESPN’s Shams Charania both reported that, barring any setbacks, he is expected to be available for Game 1 of the conference finals. That’s good news for a Knicks team that will need him to knock down 3s, drive closeouts and finish through contact on the interior — all while serving as the primary defensive option against Mobley, who had a fantastic close to Round 2 as a finisher and secondary playmaker, and to be able to switch onto either Mitchell or Harden to stifle a Cavs pick-and-roll game that can be one of the NBA’s very best when it’s humming.
But when he returns to the court after nearly two weeks away from live game action, will Anunoby be able to immediately rediscover the phenomenal shot-making rhythm he was in before the injury? Will he be able to move as quickly and fluidly on defense, and play with the same level of confidence and physicality? On top of that, hamstrings are notoriously fickle things; even with the additional rest afforded by the Sixers sweep, might Anunoby be risking reinjury, and a longer potential layoff, by coming back for the start of the series?
The best version of the Knicks features Anunoby finishing offensive possessions and blowing up defensive ones. If he comes back looking like the two-way monster who was dominating Atlanta and Philadelphia, their chances of advancing to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 improve dramatically. If he’s limited, though, New York becomes less potent and more vulnerable on both ends of the floor.
If the version of the Cavaliers we saw in Detroit on Sunday night is the one that shows up for the next two weeks, Cleveland can absolutely make it to the Finals. But with New York having such a massive rest advantage, with less than 48 hours between the end of Game 7 and the start of Game 1, with the Cavs coming off consecutive grueling seven-game series with five players (Harden, Mitchell, Mobley, Allen and Strus) having played more postseason minutes than any member of the Knicks, and with the games coming every other day without an opportunity to catch a breather, I think it’s more likely the Cavs run out of gas than a Knicks team that’s been firing on all cylinders sputters through the finish line.
The Cavs have been great at home in these playoffs. But the Knicks have won a road game in seven of nine playoff series in the Brunson era — a run that started by taking two in Cleveland back in 2022. Brunson and Co. make it eight of 10, and punch their ticket to New York’s first NBA Finals of the 21st century.
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