Football
Like many fellow tri-state area residents, New York Knicks star Josh Hart just wanted to spend his Sunday afternoon watching his favorite blue football team.
“Hurry up,” Hart said when he took the Sunday podium in video from SNY. “Chelsea plays in one minute.”
Hart obviously hopes Chelsea F.C.’s 1-0 win over Nottingham Forest in English Premier League action isn’t the only cause for celebration this weekend. His Knicks face the Indiana Pacers on Sunday night in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals (8 p.m. ET, TNT).
The Knicks trail the best-of-seven set 2-0 and are linger in dangerous territory: never mind the fact that no team in NBA history has ever overcome a 3-0 deficit in a postseason series. New York is seeking to become the first to get out of an 0-2 hole after dropping the opening acts at home.
Hart continued to showcase a relatively relaxed attitude rather than panic, mentioning that he briefly stepped away from the game to “MLB: The Show,” engaging in the Major League Baseball’s simulator’s career mode (Hart’s creation is already playing at the Triple-A level). In between, he took in the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Game 3 tilt with the Oklahoma City Thunder, one that saw the former get on the board with a dominant 143-101 victory.
Minnesota set the tone for the game with a 34-14 advantage at the end of the first period and the Thunder never got the deficit back under 20 after that. Hart hopes that the Knicks can engage in similar antics with the series moving to Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Sunday.
“I think we need something drastic in terms of our energy and effort and our competitiveness,” Hart said in video from SNY. “You saw that with Minnesota yesterday. They came out of the gate aggressive … Every game of a playoff series, the intensity has to pick up and you can’t have any lapses, especially to start the game and you allow a team like [the Pacers], who’s extremely talented offensively, to get comfortable. So I think that’s the biggest, drastic thing we can do, is have that energy change.”
Read More Geoff Magliocchetti