Steve Popper: Knicks again play down to the competition
Knicks guard Jalen Brunson is defended by Golden State's Omer Yurtseven in the first half of an NBA game at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Mike Brown joked before Sunday night’s game that his old friend, Steve Kerr, had texted him and come up “with some killer plays that were going to make us spin backwards and forward. I believe him.”
Kerr had little else to offer as he brought Golden State to Madison Square Garden for a nationally televised game with eight players missing — including Jimmy Butler (out for the season), Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Al Horford, Kristaps Porzingis, Moses Moody and even another Curry in Seth Curry.
So what excuse did the Knicks have for falling behind by 21 points in the second quarter? It’s not as if this sort of game was going to catch them by surprise.
In the midst of a soft spot in the schedule, they seem to fall behind teams tanking or fielding skeleton crews and have to fight their way back.
Jalen Brunson kept his team alive much of the night, scoring 30 points to salvage a 110-107 win over Golden State as the Knicks escaped with another harder-than-you’d-imagine win.
“If you expect to be who you think you are at the end of the day, you will approach this in a businesslike manner,” Brown said. “The biggest thing is making sure you don’t skip any details. I think in games like this, the details or the small things are huge.
“And playing with a sense of urgency while making them feel you on both ends of the floor. That doesn’t mean going out and blowing them out, but if you’re lackadaisical at any point in the game for any stretch, they’re NBA players.
“A lot of these guys are hungry and some of them have proven that they belong on this level and in a pretty good spot in terms of a rotation. If you relax at any moment in time and they see one, two, three go in, like the guys did in Utah, it can be a climb back up the hill to get back in the game.”
Just like when the Knicks were in Utah, where they trailed by 18 in the first half before turning the game around, it was Jordan Clarkson providing a boost off the bench with energy and offense, a promising development after he was relegated to the end of the bench for much of the season. Clarkson had 14 points and shot 6-for-11 in 21:45.
But unlike Utah, Golden State (32-35) isn’t playing for ping-pong balls. Almost certainly locked into a play-in game — entering the night in ninth place in the Western Conference, nine games up on the Grizzlies — there is no lottery pick awaiting them.
Even minus nearly its entire star-studded rotation, Golden State had a shot to take the lead in the final minute, but Brandon Podziemski misfired on a quick three-point attempt with 23 seconds to play. Landry Shamet hit two free throws with 16.2 seconds left to give the Knicks a three-point edge, and after Podziemski’s layup with 7.2 seconds left, OG Anunoby hit two free throws. With a sigh of relief, the Knicks were able to hang on.
Will it matter when the record is put in the history books at the end of the season? Maybe not. The Knicks are 44-25, one game ahead of last season’s pace at this point, and they’ve still got Indiana at home, a game in Brooklyn and home games against Washington and New Orleans on the schedule.
But if every one of these supposedly gimmes turns into a battle for their lives, it won’t provide the respite in the schedule that it appears to be on paper.
“At the end of the day, you got to respect everybody,” Josh Hart said. “And if you’re in a situation like this, you never want to play with a game or anything like that because you never know what’ll happen at the end of a game. You don’t want to put yourself in that position for someone to make a shot, someone to miss a shot, a ref to call a call you don’t agree with. So we got to approach this like any other game.
“And if that’s the case, then we should handle business early and it should be a game where everybody gets to play. But these guys are good. They’re in the NBA for a reason.”
The thing is, the Knicks are not a young team on the way. They are a veteran, experienced group, one that not only has heard it from Brown but had Tom Thibodeau barking in their ears for years that “everything matters” and “everyone in the NBA is great or they wouldn’t be here.”
The Knicks just went through a stretch of games that needed their best every night, yet 69 games into the season, they seem to want to turn it on when necessary and coast at other times. Is that good enough? Time will tell.
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.
