“A Beast Awakened” - ESPN’s Brian Windhorst on the Knicks’ Run of Routs

Brian Windhorst's most quoted line on Tuesday's Rich Eisen Show was not his own.

"A beast has awakened here."

That, Windhorst said, is what coaches and scouts told him when he asked what they were seeing from the Knicks. He brought the line up after Rich asked whether New York had figured something out coming off the Game 1 demolition of Philadelphia.

The framing inside the Knicks is real. Windhorst pointed back to a Thursday in Atlanta two and a half weeks earlier. New York lost Game 3 by a point. They held a team meeting on the off day. Whatever happened in that meeting, Windhorst said, the Knicks have not looked like the same team since.

"You talk to people in Atlanta and they say, 'Holy hell, the team that we played in games four, five, and six were nothing like the team that we played in games one, two, and three,'" Windhorst said. He repeated the Hawks' read on the series back to Rich. New York could have easily been down 0-3 instead of up 2-1 if a couple of last-second shots had bounced differently. Then the Knicks "got bashed across the bridge of the nose" the next three games, and Atlanta could not figure out where it came from.

The carryover into Round 2 was instant. Windhorst broke down the Knicks' first-quarter game plan against Joel Embiid. The strategy was to put Embiid in pick-and-roll on every relevant possession, and to attack the basket in transition before he could recover. Mikal Bridges got a driving dunk past him in the first quarter. Karl-Anthony Towns got another one running by him.

"They are playing with such a purpose and a focus on offense right now that it's starting to make you wonder," Windhorst said.

The catch is what made the segment honest. Windhorst was not ready to declare the team different forever. He pointed to a 2-9 stretch in mid-season as the reason they are the three seed and not the one seed. He pointed to the regular-season record against Detroit, which was bad. He acknowledged the entire East is flawed, including the team that just got bashed across the bridge of the nose.

His read on the path: avoid Detroit and the Knicks have a real run. Mike Brown's after-game quote, which Rich pulled up, suggested the locker-room buy-in is genuine. "Whatever he's been preaching is now being practiced and executed," Brown said. The fastball, Windhorst said, you cannot touch. Whether they can win when they are throwing anything else is a different question.