While I knew this matchup would be us sweeping the Knicks, it's clear why they wanted the matchup.
8-2 against the Hawks in the RS with Trae here.
Most don't watch us play so they assume Trae is whatever narrative that's out there. Even when he goes off, we still lose.
What they didn't take into account is:
They massively benefited from dominating the center matchup for the first two years.
No real gameplan to care about Randle each of the last two years.
Hunter barely played the Knicks and we never used him against Randle.
Gallo didn't play the Knicks at all.
Everyone plays extremely hard in the playoffs. In the RS, that's a skill but in the playoffs, everyone plays hard. What happen in the RS doesn't really matter.
Most importantly, NY been killing us in the RS of the last three years with the backup PG matchup. With Trae playing more mins and Lou as the backup PG, it's not so easy.
A big advantage for the Hawks is Cam Reddish not playing. R.J. stats against Reddish is lethal. The big reason I hated playing the Knicks is Cam wanted to guard R.J. but would get bullied. Some of his offensive games were hit or miss. Wasn't a fan. The reason why the Hawks are putting Trae on R.J. is because Trae can laterally guard him, R.J. isn't a good pull up shooter, he's a C&S guy and once he post up, we wait till he gets in scoring position then we hard double as all NYK scorers are reactive passers, but not instinctive passers.