Knicks vs Pacers: Who Wins the East Series? Keys, Schedule and Prediction for Epic Battle of Bitter Rivals
The Eastern Conference’s No. 3 seed, the New York Knicks (51-31), will take on the No. 4-seed Indiana Pacers (50-32) in the Eastern Conference finals, the third round of the 2025 NBA playoffs. This is a rematch of last season’s Eastern Conference semifinals, which the Pacers won in seven games. According to Yahoo Sports, it’s also the ninth time New York and Indiana have met in the postseason since 1993, with the Pacers winning five of the eight previous matchups.
Spike Lee’s still sitting courtside, and Reggie Miller will be on the call. Tyrese Haliburton vs. Jalen Brunson is literally the culmination of a WWE storyline. The past is never dead; it’s not even past. As noted by Yahoo Sports, the Knicks were completely unable to beat the best teams in the NBA … until they weren’t.
New York had been middling for months: 28-21 after Jan. 1, with the NBA’s No. 14 offense and No. 16 defense in that span, needing six knife-fight-in-the-mud games to get past the precocious Pistons in an at-times-wobbly opening-round victory. Heading into the conference semis against a Celtics team that had swept them during the regular season, many expected a short series.
“If [head coach Tom] Thibodeau can’t come up with an out-of-left-field method of forcing the Celtics to play left-handed,” Yahoo Sports wrote in their series preview, “it’s tough to see the postseason matchup unfolding much differently than the regular-season edition.”
And then Thibs told his guys to start switching, and the Celtics started short-circuiting from long range, and Jalen Brunson and Mikal Bridges came up with a couple of massive fourth quarters … and, before you knew it, the Knicks were up 3-1, and Boston’s best player was out for the season.
Reality can shift with staggering speed in the NBA playoffs, and after a dominant series-clinching victory that saw Brunson, Bridges, Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby all top 20 points for the third time this postseason — a first for any foursome in NBA playoff history, according to Justin Kubatko of Statitudes — the Knicks now find themselves with a golden opportunity: win your home games, and you’re in the NBA Finals.
That’s easier said than done, facing a Pacers team that has gone 4-1 on the road through two rounds and has been red-hot for months. But New York is playing past mid-May for the first time in 25 years, with a real chance to win the NBA championship, and has just put together two performances — Games 4 and 6 against the C’s, at home — that might’ve been its best all season, and that pointed toward a significantly higher ceiling than those middling last few months.
The Knicks’ biggest bets are all paying off at exactly the right time. Might as well let it ride and see just how far this reality shift can take them.
What We Know About the Pacers
They’re still one of the NBA’s hardest-charging outfits, playing at the postseason’s third-fastest pace — behind only Memphis and Oklahoma City, who played one another — and scoring more points per playoff possession than any other team in the final four behind arguably the league’s most balanced attack. Six Pacers — starters Haliburton, Pascal Siakam, Myles Turner, Aaron Nesmith and Andrew Nembhard, plus reserve guard Bennedict Mathurin — averaged at least 10 points per game on 50% shooting in the second round; according to Kubatko, that ties the NBA record for the most such players in a single series.
According to Yahoo Sports, this season, though, that balance extends to the defensive end, where Indiana ranks seventh in points allowed per possession over the past five-plus months. Nembhard and Nesmith are incredible and physical at the point of attack. Turner leads the postseason in blocks. And the Pacers’ remarkable depth — 11 players averaging at least nine minutes per game in this postseason, with nobody over Haliburton’s 34.1 — allows head coach Rick Carlisle to employ a full-court press more frequently and hellaciously than any other team in the NBA.
The combination of pedal-to-the-metal pace, defensive steel, high-quality marksmanship in both the backcourt and frontcourt — Indiana leads the playoff field in effective field-goal percentage, shooting 50.1% from the field, 40.6% from 3-point land and 79.5% from the free-throw line as a team — and bona fide All-NBA-level play from Haliburton and Siakam has made Indiana one of the best teams in the NBA for months. As Yahoo Sports noted, the Pacers are 42-16 since Jan. 1 — a .724 winning percentage that translates to a 59-win pace over a full 82-game slate, and that includes their 8-2 run through Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks and Donovan Mitchell’s top-seeded Cavaliers.
Head-to-Head
The Knicks won the regular-season series, 2-1, posting two of their 15 most efficient offensive games of the season in their wins — which, conversely, ranked as Indiana’s sixth and seventh-worst defensive games of the campaign.
The first: a 123-98 blowout all the way back in October, in both teams’ second outing of the new campaign. As was the case in Game 6 against Boston, New York featured a balanced attack, with Brunson, Towns, Bridges and Hart all scoring 20 or more points.
The Pacers, on the other hand, struggled mightily on offense, shooting just 3 for 30 from 3-point range with Haliburton going scoreless on 0-for-8 shooting in the loss.
Matchup to Watch
Who guards KAT? During the regular season, the answer, mostly, was the Pacers’ centers — Turner in the first two meetings, and reserve Thomas Bryant in the third, with Turner sidelined. And that answer, mostly, was not good enough.
Putting a center on KAT — even a defender as big and good as Turner — opens your defense up to a world of hurt: the hard-to-handle drives with which Towns punished Al Horford last round; New York feasting on off-ball cuts and slashes to the paint with your best rim protector lifted out of the lane; the Knicks dusting off the Brunson-Towns two-man game that was so dominant early in the season.
Crunch-Time Lineups
New York Knicks: Thibs is probably going to lean heavily, if not entirely, on Brunson, Towns, Hart, Bridges and Anunoby. That lineup played more minutes than any other five-man grouping in the NBA during the regular season and more than any unit outside of Denver through the first two rounds, including a league-high 42 fourth-quarter minutes.
Indiana Pacers: Nembhard, Turner, Siakam, Nesmith and Haliburton lead Indiana in fourth-quarter minutes during the postseason. They’ve played nearly all of Indiana’s “clutch” minutes — defined by NBA Advanced Stats as when the score is within five points in the final five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime.
Prediction: Pacers in 6
According to Yahoo Sports, I think the Knicks’ core group can reach a higher ceiling than Indiana’s, but I feel more confident in how consistently the Pacers can play above their floor — in how readily Haliburton will generate good shots (often by targeting Towns in the pick-and-roll), in how the persistent ball pressure will weigh on Brunson and/or force the ball into the hands of less capable initiators, in Siakam’s metronomic production as a primary scorer/second banana, in Nembhard and Nesmith continuing to make deflating jumpers, and in a Pacers reserve corps that plays with maximum effort for maximum impact.
Series Betting Odds
New York Knicks (-155)
Indiana Pacers (+130)
Series Schedule (all times Eastern)
Game 1: Wednesday @ New York (8 p.m., TNT)
Game 2: Friday @ New York (8 p.m., TNT)
Game 3: Sunday, May 25 @ Indiana (8 p.m., TNT)
Game 4: Tuesday, May 27 @ Indiana (8 p.m., TNT)
Game 5: Thursday, May 29 @ New York (8 p.m., TNT)
Game 6: Saturday, May 31 @ Indiana (8 p.m., TNT)
*Game 7: Monday, June 2 @ New York (8 p.m., TNT)
*if necessary
