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The Knicks didn't just beat the Sixers. They erased them.

Sunday in Philadelphia, New York closed out a four-game sweep with a 144-114 demolition that wasn't competitive past the first quarter. The Knicks tied the NBA playoff record with 25 made threes, set the league mark with 11 made threes in the first quarter alone, and were up 81-57 at halftime. Deuce McBride — starting in place of an injured OG Anunoby — went 7-of-9 from deep and dropped 25. The Knicks' average margin of victory through two rounds is now 19.4 points per game, the largest through two rounds since the playoffs expanded to 16 teams in 1984.

This wasn't a series. It was a coronation.

And every Celtics fan in New England has spent the last 48 hours staring at the same uncomfortable question: would we have given them a better fight?

Let's actually dig into it.

What the Knicks Just Did

Worth lingering on for a second, because the answer to the hypothetical depends on how you read this Knicks team.

Through two rounds, New York is 8-1 in playoff games. Their seven straight wins is the longest playoff streak in franchise history. They've won four games by 29-plus points. They closed out the Hawks in Round 1 with a 51-point Game 4 in Atlanta, then closed out the Sixers in Round 2 with a 30-point Game 4 in Philly. Their two closeout games this postseason were won by a combined 81 points.

Mike Brown — yes, the Mike Brown who got fired by the Kings in December — has the Knicks playing the most efficient offensive basketball of any team in 30 years through three quarters of Sunday's game. Jalen Brunson is the engine. Karl-Anthony Towns is the matchup nightmare. McBride and Hart are the energy. Bridges is the connective tissue. Anunoby is a complementary star.

It is, by every available measure, the best basketball any East team has played in two years.

So Would Boston Have Given Them a Better Series?

Short answer: yes, but not by as much as Celtics fans want to believe.

The Sixers were a uniquely poor matchup for these Knicks — a team that was visibly gassed from a Game 7 emotional gauntlet against Boston, missing its best player for stretches, and built around an offense that can't generate efficient looks without a healthy Embiid. The Knicks were going to roll somebody in Round 2. It happened to be Philly. Boston would have given them more than four games. That's the easy part.

The hard part is figuring out how much more.

The Tale of the Tape

Start with the regular season, because the numbers are surprising.

Boston: 56-26 (2-seed). +7.4 net rating. 4th in defensive rating. Top-5 offense. New York: 55-27 (3-seed). +6.9 net rating. 2nd in offensive rating. Solid defense.

Head-to-head: Split 2-2. None of the four games was decided by more than 10.

These teams were essentially identical in the regular season. Whatever you saw from the Knicks beating up on Philly tells you almost nothing about how a Knicks-Celtics series would have actually looked.

Where Boston Actually Matches Up Better Than Philly

The 76ers had three critical structural disadvantages against the Knicks. Boston wouldn't have had any of them:

Philly had no Brunson stopper. Tyrese Maxey is a great offensive player and a sieve defensively against a downhill point guard. Brunson dropped 35 on him in Game 1 and 33 in Game 3. Kelly Oubre tried; it didn't matter. Boston, by contrast, has multiple credible Brunson defenders — Derrick White is one of the best on-ball guards in the league, Jordan Walsh has the physicality, and the Celtics can throw fresh bodies at Brunson all night. Brunson still gets his, but not 35 on 18 shots. Not without working.

Philly had no answer for KAT. Embiid was too slow on the perimeter, too hobbled to attack KAT on the other end. Towns was shooting threes over him and feasting in pick-and-pop. Boston's defensive system is built on switching everything — Hauser, Pritchard, and Tatum (when healthy) would all take turns on KAT. None of them are seven feet, but all of them can move their feet. Switching neutralizes the mismatch problem. KAT would still get his 17-20 a night, but he wouldn't be the series-breaker he was against Philly.

Philly had no second offensive engine. The Sixers needed Embiid healthy and Maxey hot and Paul George making threes just to score 100. Boston has five guys who can get their own shot. Tatum, Brown, White, Pritchard, Hauser. The Celtics' offense doesn't collapse if one guy goes cold. Philly's did.

So on paper, Boston is a much harder out for the Knicks than the Sixers turned out to be.

But There Are Real Caveats

Here's where this hypothetical gets shaky for Boston fans:

Tatum is still hurt in this scenario. Remember why Boston lost to Philly: Jayson Tatum was either limited or absent for the entire second half of that series. He got his knee wrapped on the bench in Game 6. He was OUT for Game 7. That doesn't change. If Boston had somehow stolen Game 7 from the Sixers, Tatum is still compromised heading into Round 2. The Knicks would have been playing against a Celtics team without its best player, or with a version of him operating at 70%.

The Mazzulla coaching question. Joe Mazzulla started Luka Garza, Baylor Scheierman, and Ron Harper Jr. in Game 7 against Philly. Those three combined for zero points. Bill Simmons called him out. Boston sports radio is still calling him out. If those are the decisions Mazzulla was making in a Game 7 against the Sixers, what was the plan against a Mike Brown team that just hung 144 on a Round 2 opponent? You'd love to assume Mazzulla learns from the mistake. The track record this postseason doesn't support that assumption.

The Knicks are playing transcendent basketball. This is the one nobody wants to fully reckon with. 25 made threes in a closeout game. 18 in the first half. 11 in the first quarter. The Knicks are playing the kind of basketball that bends matchup advantages. Even a fully-healthy Celtics team — even one with prime Tatum back — would have to play near-perfect to win four of seven against this version of New York.

What the Series Would Have Actually Looked Like

If you forced a projection — Tatum at maybe 75%, the rest of the roster healthy, Mazzulla making rational decisions:

Knicks in 6.

Boston's defense would have made the Knicks earn it. Games would have been in the 105-115 range instead of 130-144. Brunson would have still gotten his numbers, but his efficiency would have dipped. KAT would have had stretches where he goes 4-of-13 because Boston is switching him into actions he doesn't love. Hauser and Pritchard would have made enough threes to keep the Celtics' offense in range. White would have had at least one signature game.

But the Knicks would have won three close games and one ugly one, because:

1. Brunson is the best player in the series even with a healthy Tatum
2. New York is playing the best basketball of any East team right now, full stop
3. Mike Brown's adjustments have been a step ahead of every opponent so far
4. Boston's bench depth got hollowed out at the deadline (Simons, Minott, Boucher, Tillman all gone)

If Tatum were fully healthy and Mazzulla coached out of his mind, maybe you push it to seven. Realistically? Six games. Knicks win.

The Painful Part

Here's the thing Celtics fans have to sit with: the reason the Knicks are headed to the Eastern Conference Finals isn't a bad matchup or bad luck or an Embiid injury. It's that Boston was supposed to be the one doing this.

The Celtics had the regular-season record. The defensive identity. The championship pedigree. The home court. The deeper rotation. The reigning Finals MVP. All of it. And they coughed up a 3-1 lead to a 7-seed that was missing its best player for half the series, in a Game 7 at home, where they got blown out by 9 with three role players going scoreless as starters.

The Knicks didn't take the Celtics' spot. The Celtics gave it to them.

So the question of "would we have given the Knicks a better series" is a real one, and the answer is yes — probably a 6-game series instead of a 4-game pillow fight. But it's the wrong question to be asking. The right question is the one that's going to haunt Boston all summer: how did a team this talented, this experienced, this recently a champion, end up watching the Eastern Conference Finals from their couch?

That answer is uglier than any hypothetical, and there isn't a clean way to spin it.

What's Next

The Knicks now wait for the Cavaliers-Pistons winner. Cleveland trails 2-1 with Game 4 in Detroit on Monday night. Either matchup would be a step up from what Philly offered, but neither team is playing at the level the Knicks are playing right now. New York is the favorite to come out of the East and the team that will give whoever survives the West (almost certainly OKC) the most trouble in the Finals.

Boston, meanwhile, gets a long summer to figure out what went wrong. The roster is mostly under contract. Mazzulla's seat is warm but not hot. Tatum will be healthier. The bench needs reinforcements.

The hypothetical of "would we have given the Knicks a better series" will get re-litigated in Boston bars for the next six months. The honest answer — yes, but they'd still have lost — doesn't make any of it feel better.

File it under "things that should have been ours." There are going to be a lot of those filed in New England this offseason.