Steve Popper: Knicks still putting it together as regular season draws to close
Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns drives against Grizzlies forward Olivier-Maxence Prosper in the second half of an NBA basketball game on Wednesday in Memphis, Tenn. Credit: AP/Brandon Dill
It was a year ago at this time that the Knicks were making their way through the final days of the regular season with an eye on the postseason to come, and if you know anything about the team under Tom Thibodeau it’s that they never entered a game thinking ahead; they were always focused on the next opponent. And in the final week of the season, the Knicks lost consecutive games to Boston, Detroit and Cleveland, all potential playoff opponents.
We only raise this to remind the panicking masses that those games, like the 0-10 record that incarnation of the Knicks posted in the regular season last year against the Celtics, Thunder and Cavs, would mean nothing when the postseason began.
That brings us to this current Knicks team and the questions — internally and externally — about just what lies ahead when the playoffs begin.
Even in the Knicks' locker room the mood swings shift like a pendulum. In Houston Tuesday night, after a third straight loss, the Knicks spoke about trending in the wrong direction, the frustration with the same issues — slow starts, lack of physicality, uncertain roles — and the tone was grim.
About 24 hours later after a win over a skeleton-crew squad the Memphis Grizzlies put on the court, Jalen Brunson, who had sat out to rest a sore right ankle, was running the music, blaring singalong songs, as players loudly joked with each other and Josh Hart interrupted interviews with Karl-Anthony Towns and OG Anunoby to prod them into answers.
“I think the togetherness is there,” Mike Brown said after the Houston loss. “Now like any other team throughout the course of the season sometimes you feel like it’s not there. Sometimes you don’t. But if I’m talking overall, yes I do.”
It certainly seemed like it late Wednesday night and it did on the court, too. The Knicks handed out 36 assists on 48 buckets — 14 assists in the first quarter alone when they tied a franchise record with 48 points. Without Brunson, much of the offense ran through Towns, who posted a triple-double with 20 points, 11 rebounds and a season-high 11 assists.
“I was disappointed we didn’t get 40 [assists], honestly,” Towns said. “I thought we did a great job moving the ball . . . . Playing with a .5 (seconds) mentality (referring to Brown's philosophy of quick offensive decisions)", doing everything we needed to do to beat a good team, a hungry team, a lot of guys trying to prove themselves in this league. I thought we did a good job weathering the storm.”
The Grizzlies were, like many of the opponents the Knicks have beaten recently, lottery-bound with a combination of G League call-ups, 10-day contract signings and end-of-the-roster players given opportunities. So any storm the Knicks were weathering was self-induced.
Brown, having been a part of stellar offensive units in Golden State and Sacramento, was brought in to try to make all of the Knicks' pieces fit together, a talented starting five that has too often relied on Brunson to shoulder the load and drag the team as far as he can.
Without Brunson in the lineup Wednesday the Knicks had a balanced attack, Anunoby leading with 25 points while Mikal Bridges adding 24. Any notion that the Knicks are better without Brunson or that his game needs to change certainly hasn’t watched what he has done to raise the Knicks from a dysfunctional franchise for decades to a perennial contender.
What would certainly help the Knicks and Brunson is consistency from these other players. You could go back to the Patrick Ewing-era Knicks teams and remember that John Starks or Derek Harper could have an off night and it was a side note, but if Ewing did panic set in and headlines blared. Since the All-Star break, Brunson has averaged 8.2 assists per game, a number that would be the highest for a full season of his career — and would rank fourth in the NBA this season behind only Nikola Jokic, Cade Cunningham and Luka Doncic.
“Yeah, I feel the team we have, a lot of guys able to shoot, drive,” Bridges said. “I’ve been talking about this since last year. We got a lot of talent that can do a lot of things. Just got to share the ball and play off each other and try to make the right reads . . .
“Just learning. We know JB is really skilled, too. It’s not like — how to say it —I don’t feel like as a player, knowing how great a talent he is, every time he has to give it up. I don’t believe that. HIs skill is undeniable. I think our offense and trusting that everybody else can make plays and don’t have to make it too stagnant for one person, makes it easier for the other teams to guard us.”
In an ideal world, one the Knicks' front office imagined when they put this roster together and when they pushed out Thibodeau and hired Brown, all of these offensive weapons in the starting lineup create an unstoppable grouping. Instead, they have one that with five games left is still trying to figure out how to play together.
But that’s why the Knicks can look back to last year and the stumbles before the postseason. And hope, fingers crossed, that they can find their way again.
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
