Knicks thought they were going to Las Vegas, and they might be, but Milwaukee is next

The New York Knicks thought they were headed to Las Vegas. They didn’t realize they had a stop in Milwaukee first.

In the initial moments following Tuesday’s 115-91 victory over the Charlotte Hornets, a handful of Knicks players began their celebrations. They were traveling to Sin City as part of the NBA’s In-Season Tournament, a new feature that began this autumn, one that has left even the world’s most skilled accountants aghast at how to keep score.

And apparently, even some players were out of the loop.

The Knicks are not off to Vegas. At least, not yet. They first must play the Milwaukee Bucks on Tuesday in the In-Season Tournament’s quarterfinal, which they are officially moving onto after the victory over the Hornets. If they win there, they move on to the semifinals and possibly the finals — both of which are in their dream city.

“We were saying we’re going to Vegas, like when you say you’re going to Disney World when you win the Super Bowl,” Immanuel Quickley said.

Quickley proudly has tunnel vision about the NBA season. All those clichés head coach Tom Thibodeau spews about living in the present, taking the schedule “one game at a time” — Quickley takes them to the extreme. He says he doesn’t keep track of his statistics. He’s rarely aware of his cold or hot streaks. Earlier this week, he admitted he did not even know the Knicks’ win-loss record. And it’s not like he was counting down the seconds until Tuesday, the final night of the In-Season Tournament’s group play rounds.

He didn’t even realize until Tuesday that the match with Charlotte was a tournament game. And once they won, he was one of the few convinced it meant an automatic flight to Vegas.

“Nobody has been through this so everybody is on edge,” Quickley said. “It’s kind of different than just playing a straight 82-game season. So it’s kind of cool.”

The confusion isn’t just because of novelty, either. Even Pythagoras would need to triple-check his math about who moves onto what the NBA is calling “the knockout round” and who does not.

The Knicks didn’t just have to beat the Hornets to make the quarterfinals; they had to annihilate them. Even if New York won by only, say, 11 points, it still may not have been enough because the Boston Celtics could wreck the Chicago Bulls by 35 (and they almost did), which would’ve hurt the Knicks’ chances. They also had to worry about the result of the Bucks versus the Miami Heat. Then they had to calculate the square root of pi and divide by the derivative of Charles Oakley’s rebounds per game — and they had to do it all while patting their head with one hand and rubbing their belly with the other.

Maybe that’s why the analytics guy had to be the one to break the bad news to the team.

As the Knicks celebrated a free trip to Vegas and a chance to win $500,000 while they were there, Nick Restifo, a member of their analytics team, delivered reality. They must reign victorious in the land of beer and brats before conquering the blackjack tables.

Up on the television, the one that all cubbies in the Knicks’ locker room point at, was another NBA game: the Bucks and Heat coming down to the wire with only minutes to go. It would determine the Knicks’ fate.

Now, it’s settled. The Knicks are the wild card, the one Eastern Conference team to finish second in its group and advance to the quarterfinals, where they will meet the winners of Groups A, B and C.

They play Milwaukee on Tuesday. The winner of that game faces the winner of the East’s other quarterfinal match: The Indiana Pacers versus the Celtics.

The semifinal is scheduled for Dec. 7. The championship game is scheduled for Dec. 9.

Both will be in Vegas. And Quickley wasn’t the only one who may as well have been chanting the name of that city after the game.

Julius Randle — shortly after one of his best performances of the season, going for 25 points, 20 rebounds and five assists against Charlotte — spoke gleefully about the In-Season Tournament. He confirmed he was a fan of the format. It took not even a sentence to sum up why.

“A chance to go to Vegas,” he said.

But is it a chance to go to Vegas or a chance to win $500,000 in Vegas?

“A chance to go to Vegas,” Randle said before hesitating, thinking over the answer and quickly verifying that he had it correct all along. “Yeah, a chance to go to Vegas.”

As RJ Barrett put it so succinctly earlier this week, “If someone said you can go to Vegas and win $500K, would you wanna do that?”

The Knicks’ bank accounts will grow either way.

Players receive $50,000 each if their team loses in the quarterfinals. If it loses in the semis, the bonus is $100,000. If it loses in the championship game, they make $200,000 each. And if they win the whole thing, that’s a cool half-million transferred into their pockets.

Josh Hart says he’s buying himself a new watch if the Knicks earn their mega bonuses, the same thought any old chum must get when he finds $500,000 in an old jacket. But it won’t be easy. Even the In-Season Tournament’s most stringent followers must acknowledge that there are downfalls to advancing as far as the Knicks have.

All of these games, except for the final, count toward the regular-season standings. And because the Knicks are only one of eight teams remaining, their schedule becomes more difficult. They have an extra game now against the Bucks, one of the best teams in the league that they will now play five times this season.

Teams that didn’t make the tournament had regular-season matches scheduled for next week. And if the Knicks had beaten Charlotte narrowly Tuesday instead of in a blowout, still giving them one more tally in the win column, their point differential (which was the tiebreaker that helped them move on) could have been low enough to keep them out of the knockout round, also handing them a chance to play a bad team next week.

It’s not just about the extra Bucks game, either. The In-Season Tournament brings the stresses of playoff scheduling into December basketball … and multiplies it by 10.

The Knicks will have to pack for six days when they go to Milwaukee — just in case they keep winning. And advancing to the final, which is a week from Saturday, could exhaust them.

That would send them to Milwaukee on Dec. 5, Vegas on Dec. 7 and 9, back home for a game on Dec. 11 and then back west for a four-game road trip that begins in Utah on Dec. 13.

Of course, if someone offered you $500,000 just to take an extra cross-country flight, you might accept — especially if it got you a free trip to Vegas.

(Photo of Julius Randle: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE via Getty Images)