Knicks start title defense with two straight losses after comeback comes up short in Boston

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BOSTON — The Knicks were still stuck in the mud. Especially a scoreless and benched Mikal Bridges. 

And after the Knicks climbed out of their mud hole, Jayson Tatum sent them right back down Friday night. 

Tatum scored nine of his 36 points in the final six minutes of Boston’s 107-103 victory over the Knicks, who fell to 0-2 as the reigning champs. 

The Celtics star pulled off several high-difficulty shots, and the Knicks couldn’t keep up after clawing back from a double-digit deficit midway through the fourth. 

“I think we took a stride, just not big enough strides,” Jalen Brunson said. “There’s positives and negatives to take from this game. We know what we have to do, and the things I think are glaring to us are controllable. So that’s a positive we can take from this.” 

Tatum certainly outdueled Brunson, who missed 10 of his 17 shots in 37 minutes and finished with 19 points. It followed the point guard’s disappointing opening night in the loss to the Sixers on Tuesday. 

Bridges, meanwhile, disappeared again. He went 0-for-8 and was benched for the last 8 ½ minutes in favor of Deuce McBride, who was a bright spot with 20 points off the bench. Over the opening two games, Bridges has shot 2-for-16. 

He played just 22 minutes in Boston. 

“Mikal had three or four wide-open 3s. And obviously we want him to make half of them if they’re open. But he’s got to keep shooting,” coach Mike Brown said. “And hopefully they’ll eventually go in — sooner than later. But he’s getting the looks that he needs to get. He just has to knock them down now. And he’s got to make sure he’s physical on the defensive end.” 

Brown harped on his team’s lack of “physicality” as the biggest factor in the defeat, which included a deficit for the final 22 minutes. 

Still, the Knicks cut it to one on Brunson’s pull-up with 1:41 remaining, and it looked like the visitors would pull off another comeback in Beantown. 

This time, Tatum squashed it. He scored seven straight Celtics points in the final 100 seconds, which sealed the home team’s win because, among other Knicks miscues, Karl-Anthony Towns committed a costly turnover on a moving screen. 

Two of Tatum’s clutch shots occurred with defender Josh Hart draped all over him. 

“You just take your hat off and say, ‘Good D, better O,’ ” Brown said. “But that’s not why we lost the game. We lost the game because we didn’t handle their physicality on both ends of the floor for too many stretches that were too long.” 

Friday night represented just the fourth Celtics win over the Knicks in the past 11 matchups, counting the postseason. 

A couple of years prior, the Celtics were New York’s nearly impossible bar. They were the better team, the reigning champs, the frequent destroyer of the Knicks in the regular season. In the season opener two years ago — when the Celtics were celebrating ring night for their 2024 championship — they barraged the Knicks with 3-pointers for a 23-point victory. 

It was in the middle of a stretch of eight wins over nine games for the Celtics against their division rival, and not long after the Knicks acquired OG Anunoby and Bridges to combat Tatum and then-Celtic Jaylen Brown. 

But then the 2025 playoffs happened. The Knicks completed a couple of impossible comebacks, toppled the Celtics in six games of the second round as Tatum tore his Achilles and the dynasty in Boston was finished before it really started. 

On Friday night at TD Garden, the roles were reversed. The Knicks were the hunted champs, and the Celtics were the team on the bubble of contention. Brunson understood Boston’s role in developing his championship. 

“The way they were playing, and I guess how they’re still playing, kind of helped shape our team,” Brunson said. “They were obviously a dynamic force. And obviously the past couple years with injuries and personnel changes and stuff like that, things are different. We were trying to figure out how we can beat those guys.” 

The Knicks figured it out the past year-plus. But not Friday. Tatum became their unsolvable problem.