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This is Follow the Money with Mitch Moss and Polly Howard on V-SIN.

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Circa Resort a Casino is the spot. We have a game one tonight, Eastern Conference Finals. Super intriguing series. And we go out to the progressive guest line now. Brian Mahoney has covered the Knicks and the NBA for a long time for the Associated Press. He's live at the Garden tonight for the game. Brian, great to talk to you again. How are you today? I'm good. A lot of people here tonight. I'm one of them, luckily. Yeah. Let me guess. Cavaliers fans are going to take over the garden like game seven against Detroit or no? Might look slightly different than Detroit did that night. Yeah. If those buses are coming, they're not getting in here, that's for sure. Yeah. Nick fans are going to have a tough decision, not only in this series, but if they make the finals, do I go to the game, or do I pay off my student loans, sell them or get a new car? Seriously, if you can sell one of these tickets, yeah, you're going to take a few years off and sail to travel on the world. This is a pretty high ticket demand, and I can't imagine what the number would be like if they get to another round. Yeah. Well, I loved your tweet when the playoff started that you've been covering the Knicks and the Nets a long time, but they wouldn't play basketball this time of year. There wasn't success, but everything changed when they signed Brunson.

It really has been different. It's, you know, they advanced every year since he's been here.

And the expectation now is, you know, forget just getting to the playoffs. They think they're

going to get, you know, three. This year they thought they're going to the end-day finals,

which they might. So so much has changed. It's only, like I say, five years ago when come April 15th, we knew we were going home, and that seems like forever ago nowadays. I also thought it was refreshing to watch him play. I mean, that's kind of the understatement of the century. The last seven games, they've been absolutely out of this world on offense. But a lot of it has to do with Carl Anthony Towns and actually suggesting we should run

the offense through me a little bit more playing the point center. And that was absolutely a thing

in the previous two series. I'm guessing that they're going to try to make that how the offense

is going to go again here against Cleveland, Brian? It'll be interesting, Mitch, because obviously it's worked fantastically. As you know, they pulled this out against Atlanta, and they look like a juggernaut, as Kenny Atkinson said about them. But at the same time, yeah, Cleveland has guys, first of all, they had a long time to be able to watch it now. And, too, they have guys who should be able to defend towns towns better when you're talking about Mowgli and Jared. They still take some of that stuff away. So Jared Alton. So we'll see how that works tonight. I'm sure Hicks are going to stick with it. We'll see if Cleveland can do anything about it. Do you think three years ago matters at all when they blasted them and Alan was terrible in the series? Well, you know, he's going to hear about it for sure. I think he's a much better player than the Knicks aren't quite as physical as that team was back then. So, you know, I don't think it's going to make the same difference. But if, you know, if things, if it didn't start out that way again, if he has a

bad game one, that noise is going to get loud pretty quickly. Yeah. We've been talking about this

all week. I can't believe it. OG is 35 to 1 to be Eastern Conference Finals MVP. Walk me

through. Is he 100% the practices? And now this is different than what happened when he had the hammy issue against Indiana two years ago.

Yeah, Paul, I mean, it could have been in the NBA finals a couple years ago. The way they were playing, if he didn't get hurt, they were playing that well. And, you know, they were up to nothing. And he couldn't play anymore. And he makes that much of a difference to them.

The way he's playing now, 21 points a game, and he's hitting like 60% from three-point range.

And this long gap they had has been great.

He's been, he's fully practiced their last three practices.

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