New York spent the summer on a victory lap — parade, rings, a banner raised before tipoff. Boston needed just one half to turn that coronation into a cautionary tale. New York lost 107-103 in the home opener and became the first defending NBA champion to open a season 0-2 in 15 years, the kind of sentence that usually gets attached to teams in the middle of a teardown, not the team that just hung a banner.
Two games into defending it, and this team looks nothing like the one that closed out June.
Start with Jalen Brunson, because the problem starts with him. Brunson finished with 19 points on 7-for-17 shooting, four assists against three turnovers — a normal box score for most point guards and a concerning one for a guy who’s supposed to be the engine of a championship offense. Boston made sure of that, forcing him into pull-ups late in the clock instead of letting him turn the corner, and once he stopped creating, the offense had nowhere else to go.
Bettors noticed how close it came. Brunson’s 20-plus-point total was the most popular prop on the board for this game, and he missed it by a single point. With 3.6 seconds left, Brunson intentionally sent his final free throw off the back of the rim rather than draw the game out:
Jalen Brunson 20+ points was the most-bet points prop for Knicks-Celtics.
He had 19 points and missed a free throw with 3.6 seconds left and intentionally missed the second.
The Knicks (+3) also did not end up covering. pic.twitter.com/ybEW8HLoHN
— Pikkit (@pikkitsports) October 24, 2026
That’s as tidy a summary of this version of the Knicks as any box score could give you — right at the doorstep, unable to push through.
Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby did their part. Towns went for 22 points and 10 rebounds, Anunoby matched him with 20 and 10 of his own, and both finished whatever got created for them. That’s the whole issue: finishing and creating aren’t the same skill, and New York doesn’t have anyone besides Brunson who reliably provides the second one. When the Celtics clamped down on him specifically, nobody else on the roster could make a defense pay for helping.
Jayson Tatum made the contrast obvious on the other end. Fielding questions all week about his fourth-quarter track record, Tatum answered with 36 points on 14-for-26 shooting, scoring nine of Boston’s points in the final three and a half minutes to pull away after New York had cut the deficit to one. Boston’s pressure defense had a hand in it too; the Celtics forced 16 Knicks turnovers, the kind of number that turns a competitive game into a comfortable one. Glenn Ordway said as much on Boston radio afterward, crediting Tatum for taking the game over down the stretch while noting the turnovers did the rest of the damage.
Only the 2011-12 Mavericks have started a title defense this poorly, opening that season 0-3 before settling into a middling season that still ended in a playoff berth, proof a slow start isn’t automatically a death sentence. But it does cost margin, and in a conference where the Knicks still have to play Boston three more times and whatever Toronto is quietly building up north, margin is exactly what you can’t get back in November.
New York has three weeks before anyone outside the fanbase starts taking this seriously. Spend them finding a second guy who can bend a defense, because right now the whole operation runs through one tired guard, and Boston just showed the rest of the conference exactly how to make him work for everything.
