A year ago, the Knicks were quietly ushered out of the playoffs by the Indiana Pacers in a seven-game conference semifinal series thanks in large part to a hail of injuries from which no team could realistically recover. Center Mitchell Robinson missed all but one game, sixth man Bojan Bogdanovic missed the whole series and star wing OG Anunoby missed all but three games.
Big man Julius Randle had been out half the year with a shoulder injury.
Beyond that, several Knicks were ailing: Star guard Jalen Brunson had a hand injury; Isaiah Hartenstein had an Achilles tendon injury; Deuce McBride had a bum toe; and Josh Hart had an abdominal injury.
The Knicks have no such issues this time around. While everyone, as the coaches' cliche goes, is banged up at this time of year, on Thursday, the Knicks filed their official injury report for Game 2 with the NBA, and the report was entirely clean. No Knicks are injured. 
Down, 1-0, in this series after a wild comeback and overtime win by the Pacers, there are no excuses for a Knicks team that holds homecourt advantage in the series. What the group does lack, though, is momentum--this Pacers team is now 8-2 in the playoffs, and closed the year on a 15-4 run to get to the 50-win mark, just a game behind New York in the East standings.
The Knicks accept the blame for what happened on Wednesday, when they coughed up a nine-point lead with less than a minute to play.
“We didn’t do what we needed to do; otherwise, we’d be in here talking about a whole different ballgame,” center Karl-Anthony Towns said. “There’s a lot of things we did good, to put ourselves in the position to win. It’s just about … and I’ve said this multiple times, executing and discipline for 48 minutes.
“We played 46 good minutes. Those last two minutes is where we lost the game. That’s on all of us.”
Game 2 will take place on Friday at Madison Square Garden, at 8 p.m. ET.
