Knicks need to finish Hawks now or risk becoming another sports cautionary tale

You don’t have to be old enough to remember that series to understand why it is relevant for the Knicks; you simply need awareness of some New York sports narratives.

It was the 1960 World Series — Pirates over the Yankees in seven — that will forever serve as the gold-standard cautionary tale for what happens when a mismatch isn’t really a mismatch at all. There have been greater upsets in sports than that — Pittsburgh did win 95 games that year, just two fewer than the Bombers.

But on the field, it often looked remarkably lopsided. The three games the Yankees won, they did so by the following scores: 16-3, 10-0, 12-0. The Yankees had 53 hits in those three games. The two shutouts belonged to Whitey Ford. All three games would have been mercy ruled if they happened in Little League, or in a beer softball league.