NBA Game of the Week: New York Knicks vs. Boston Celtics

The 2024-25 NBA season will be kicking off with a matchup featuring two of the league’s most famous franchises.

What better way to start things than to have the defending champions squaring off against the team that arguably made the biggest moves this past offseason?

The Boston Celtics will be hosting the New York Knicks on Tuesday night at TD Garden to get the new campaign underway. Naturally, both teams have extremely high expectations coming into the year.

The Celtics finally returned to the mountaintop last season, after defeating the Dallas Mavericks in 5 games to secure their NBA record 18th championship.

Boston’s roster looks fairly identical to last season’s, but why fix something if it’s not broken? However, a significant change for the Celtics in this game, and for the foreseeable future, is that center Kristaps Porzingis will be out until the springtime with a foot injury.

The New York Knicks on the other hand look very different from the last time we saw them. Out of the many trades and transactions that took place this past offseason, the Knicks arguably made the two biggest splashes with the trades they made.

Firstly, the Knicks acquired forward Mikal Bridges from the Brooklyn Nets in July for a king's ransom in draft picks and a few other veteran players. This addition temporarily created what became known as the “Nova Knicks” as Bridges at the time was the fourth former Villanova Wildcat to join the Knicks roster.

Last season, Bridges was top 25 in defensive rating, which seems to be a perfect fit for Tom Thibideaux’s Knicks team that ranked second as a team in defensive rating.

Again, the whole “Nova Knicks” team was only temporary, as one of its members was traded earlier this month. New York sent Donte DiVincenzo, Julius Randle, and a few other pieces to the Minnesota Timberwolves for star center Karl-Anthony Towns.

The Knicks lost center Isaiah Hartenstein to the Thunder in free agency, and Mitchell Robinson won’t be healthy until at least December. The point is, the Knicks needed a big.

Trading for Karl-Anthony Towns will fill this void. While injuries have plagued the four-time All-Star over recent years, in his last healthy season in 2021-22 he nearly averaged a double-double.

In that season, Towns averaged over 24 points per game and almost 10 rebounds. Not to mention that Towns is one of the best three-point shooting centers the league has ever seen

In his career, Towns has recorded a three-point percentage a few ticks under forty percent.

After exiting in the second round of the NBA playoffs last year, through these moves the Knicks have made their new goal clear: to compete for the title.

In order to do this, they’ll of course have to dethrone the team they play Tuesday night in their first game.

Last season the Celtics won the regular season matchup against New York winning 6 of the 10 games they played against one another.

Boston’s star duo of Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum averaged a combined 45 points vs the Knicks last year. The job won’t versus New York be any easier this year though as Bridges will most likely guard one of the two.

With both squads being so strong defensively, every matchup will be difficult on the offensive side of the ball, regardless of which team it is.

Even though this is only game number one, both teams will look to make a statement to open the year. After all, this very well could be a matchup we see in the playoffs.

Alex Harkins is a second-year student majoring in broadcast journalism. To contact him, email arh6278@psu.edu.