Down 0-2, Knicks’ problems start with their starters

Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, two All-NBA players, are the headliners. OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart are all high-level, two-way NBA starters.

On paper, the New York Knicks roll out a contender-level starting five — and coach Tom Thibodeau leans hard into this group, playing them 21.5 minutes a night through the first two games of the Eastern Conference Finals.

That lineup is also getting outplayed. Badly. They are -29 through two games against the Pacers, a series where the Knicks as a team are -8. The starting five has a -42.9 net rating and an atrocious 155.1 defensive rating.

Because of this starting five, the Knicks are down 0-2 to the Pacers, having dropped both games in Madison Square Garden.

Indiana isn’t doing anything different tactically than nearly every other team has done: Guard Towns with a wing because he isn’t going to punish them in the post, and put a rim-protecting center on Josh Hart and leave him open to shoot 3-pointers. When opponents have the ball, they target Towns and Brunson in pick-and-rolls. It’s a strategy teams have used against New York all season and there is no reason to change it up — it’s working.

The Knicks have looked better with their starting five broken up and Mitchell Robinson on the court. Miles McBride is also having a strong series off the New York bench.

Is it time to break up the Knicks’ starting five?

“We always look at everything,” Thibodeau said as a non-answer to that question.

Thibodeau is stubborn and stuck with this group when it wasn’t working well in the first two playoff series — they were just +3 in six games against Detroit and -24 in six games against Boston. The starting five’s problems go back further than that, this lineup was an unimpressive -9 from Jan. 1 through the end of the season.

The starting five puts the Knicks in a hole to start every game — it was 19-9 in Game 2 Friday — and then New York spends a chunk of the game just trying to get back in it. That lineup is shooting just 29.6% from 3 against the Pacers, which isn’t helping the comeback cause, but even when they close the gap, it’s time and energy spent to have to do it.

The players get it. Here is a collection of their postgame quotes (via James Edwards at The Athletic and Dan DeVine at Yahoo Sports.

“Collectively, we gotta get it together,” Brunson said. “That’s really it.

“We’re just putting ourselves in a deficit, and I told you how we can’t keep doing that,” Towns said after the Game 2 loss. “It’s not every time we’re gonna be able to fight back and find ourselves with a win, so, you know, just gotta execute and be more disciplined.”

“I think it’s a defensive thing,” Bridges said. “Sometimes you’re so in that you have to go back and watch the game, but we just have to talk to each other off the jump. We have to be physical off the jump. I think, maybe, we’re playing a little too soft in the beginning of the halves.”

When Mitchell Robinson was out the first half of the season recovering from ankle surgery, Thibodeau commonly said the team was playing without its starting center. It may be time to put words into action and start two bigs, Robinson and Towns. That duo is +27 for the playoffs (in 106 minutes) and +3 against the Pacers through two games.

Whatever the answer, New York has 48 hours to come up with one that works, because if they go down 0-3 to the Pacers, they can start booking tee times in Cancun.