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Photo by Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia CommonsCJ McCollum averaged 29 points in two games at Madison Square Garden. He scored the go-ahead bucket with 33 seconds left, then told New York where to find him.
"See you in the A."
That's not trash talk. That's a dinner invitation to a house where you're 14-2 since the All-Star Break.
The oddsmakers opened the Knicks as pre-series favorites at -275. Implied probability: 73.33%. The line for tonight? Hawks -1.5. It flipped. Vegas doesn't have feelings. Vegas has math. And the math moved.
Here's what nobody wants to say out loud: the Hawks won Game 2 shooting 1-for-12 from three in the second half. One for twelve. They outscored New York 28-15 in the fourth quarter anyway. CBS Sports ran a headline that should terrify every Knicks fan in America — "We still haven't played our best basketball yet."
That's the scariest sentence in this series.
I was at 75% on the Hawks winning this thing. I said it yesterday. I'm raising to 79%. State Farm Arena is the receipt. Best home net rating in the NBA post-break. The crowd that watched this team go from 26-30 to Southeast Division champs. They're not showing up polite tonight.
Trae Young sent the Knicks home from the first round in 2021. McCollum inherited the role, the villain label, the MSG boos. He also inherited the result.
I'm 79% sure the Hawks are winning this series. Nobody picked them. That was everybody else's mistake.
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The Tilt
The Hawks are winning this series and Game 3 at State Farm Arena is where it stops being an upset.
— Dex Ponce
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