NEW YORK — “Obviously, we want to take the next step. We want to be better than we were last year.”
That was the gauntlet Jalen Brunson threw down at the Knicks’ media day session in September — the challenge facing an organization that had seen its most successful season in decades run aground amid a hail of injuries in the seventh game of the second round and entered the offseason searching for the roster-management answer that would propel New York to the NBA’s final four for the first time in a quarter-century.
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“You know, you’re never content,” head coach Tom Thibodeau told reporters huddled into a conference room at the Knicks’ training facility in Tarrytown, New York. “You always want to try to improve, and when opportunities present themselves, and you feel like it can improve the team, you want to try to take advantage of that.”
This was the summer Leon Rose saw opportunities and sought to take advantage. The Knicks’ president pushed a slew of the team-building assets he’d been steadily stockpiling since taking over the franchise in March 2020 to the middle of the table. Good NBA players, a half-decade’s worth of draft capital, hundreds of millions of dollars in salary cap space: Rose put them all on the line, making several massive wagers that he hoped would improve the Knicks’ chances of winning multiple postseason series, and increase their odds of being the last team standing.
Just a week and a half ago, those bets seemed kind of dicey, with a middling-for-months Knicks team that struggled to dispatch the precocious Pistons about to square off with a defending-champion Celtics side that had dominated New York during the regular season. Now, though, the Knicks enter Wednesday’s Game 5 with a chance to advance to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 2000 — and it’s because those big bets are paying off.
All season long, Mikal Bridges wore the price tag around his neck like a millstone. Five first-round picks? For a guy averaging 17.6 points per game? Every time he struggled with his shot, every time he looked more like a nice complementary piece than a force multiplier worth mortgaging your draft future for, and every time the Knicks looked like less than both the sum of their parts and the fulfillment of fans’ elevated expectations, Bridges bore the brunt of the blame.
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The numbers don’t look dramatically better in the postseason: 15.4 points, 5.3 rebounds and 2.8 assists per game on 45/29/86 shooting splits. Watch the Knicks’ last five games, though — the closeout win in Detroit, and three wins in four tries against Boston — and Bridges’ impact becomes crystal clear.
Bridges has played his best defense of the season over this stretch, working with OG Anunoby to close the book on Cade Cunningham last round and toggling from Derrick White to Jaylen Brown to Jayson Tatum in this one, and coming up with massive, game-sealing plays to help the Knicks finish the road sweep that put them within arm’s reach of the upset. He came through with timely hoops in Boston: a corner 3-pointer to give New York a six-point lead in overtime of Game 1 and 14 fourth-quarter points to fuel the comeback in Game 2. He was brilliant in the second half of Game 4, playing every second of the final 24 minutes and going 7 of 8 inside the arc, repeatedly getting to his spots to drop in feathery midrange leaners over the outstretched fingertips of White, Kristaps Porziņġis and Luke Kornet.
Elite point-of-attack defense, turnover generation, secondary pick-and-roll ball-handling, an excellent midrange game, another shot creator to run the offense through when Brunson’s off the floor: This is what the Knicks traded all those picks to get. And this time of year, it’s worth its weight in gold.
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“Watching him, I mean … I’ve seen him since 2015,” Brunson said after Game 4. “And I’ve seen the way his work ethic has grown each year, and then seeing everything he does, how psychotic he is with his work … it all pays off.”
Also paying off: the decision to re-up Anunoby, committing more than a quarter of the salary cap to a player who’d never averaged more than 17.1 points per game … but whose elite defensive work and corner 3-point shooting made him a perfect running buddy for Brunson on a team in need of stops, shooting and size on the perimeter.
For a few tense moments, it seemed as though a grim bit of history might be repeating itself for New York. Anunoby — who left Game 2 of the Knicks’ second-round matchup against the Pacers last May with a strained left hamstring that cost him most of the rest of the series — began favoring that same left hamstring again late in the first quarter of Game 4, left the bench to head back to the locker room and returned with a large wrap around his left leg.
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Anunoby reentered the game midway through the second, though — he said after the game the hamstring “just felt weird a little bit, but I’m fine” — and came up huge in the second half, finishing with 20 points on 8-for-14 shooting, 3 rebounds, 2 assists and what was tantamount to the game-sealer: a pick-six dunk off a Bridges steal on the play where Tatum went down.
“Toughness. Timely plays. Flying all over the place. That was a huge steal that he made for us,” Thibodeau said after Game 4. “But he’s so disruptive. It’s not only — and look, when you’re guarding a guy like Tatum, there’s a lot of stuff that he has to navigate through, and there’s times you defend him well and he’s still gonna make [the shot]. But to do it over and over and not get deterred and to keep fighting, and then to make those plays that he made in the fourth quarter, says a lot about him.”
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The last few games also say a lot about Karl-Anthony Towns, the All-NBA centerpiece of the eve-of-training-camp blockbuster trade that represented Rose’s last big seize-the-opportunity swing for this season.
Imported to provide a five-out, floor-spacing easy button to supercharge New York’s offense, the Knicks have struggled for months to generate high-volume, high-value 3-point attempts for Towns — one reason why what was one of the league’s best offenses in the first half of the season dropped back to the middle of the pack in the second half. Towns has attempted just 10 long balls in four games against Boston, making only one … but he has continued to make his presence felt, going to work on the interior and on the glass to cause problems for Boston’s frontcourt.
Towns is averaging 19.8 points and 14 rebounds per game against Boston; according to Justin Kubatko of Statitudes, he’s the first Knick to string together three straight 20-point, 10-rebound playoff games since Patrick Ewing did it in 1996. The Celtics have continued to target him defensively on switches, and he’s sometimes prone to providing as much spaciness on that end of the court as he does space on the offensive side. But he’s also held up well at times and hasn’t let the hunting or his lack of easy 3-point looks deter him from doing the engine-room work inside.
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“He definitely stepped up to the challenge,” Brunson said. “As teammates, guys in the gap, guys in the help, just giving him confidence to press up and continue to play knowing that we have his back.
“By ‘we,’ I mean Mikal, Josh [Hart] and OG … and an occasional charge from me.”
Towns has also begun developing chemistry with center Mitchell Robinson. Thibodeau couldn’t test-drive the two-big look for most of the season, with Robinson sidelined through the All-Star break recovering from offseason ankle surgery. It’s proven effective in the postseason, though: New York has outscored Boston by 18 points in 38 two-big minutes, grabbing 39% of available offensive rebounds (a rate that would’ve led the league during the regular season) and limiting the C’s to just 35.6% shooting.
Towns even set Robinson up on a high-low feed in the fourth quarter, the first assist hookup between the pair this season … albeit after an unsuccessful initial attempt earlier in the game:
“When you’re playing against him, you understand what he brings to a team,” Towns said of Robinson, who has pulled down 14 offensive rebounds in 66 minutes over the last three games. “And when you’re playing as his teammate, you can see even more the magnitude, the impact he has in the game.”
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You don’t necessarily need to be Brunson’s teammate to see the magnitude of his impact. It doesn’t hurt, though.
“Honestly, do we all expect anything less?” Towns said when asked about a performance that saw the Knicks captain break out for 39 points on 14-of-25 shooting with 12 assists against just one turnover in 40 pristine minutes. “I expect nothing less from Cap. It gets to the fourth quarter, and he’s a bad, bad man when it comes to the fourth quarter and clutch points.”
In Game 4, though, arguably the more pivotal point came early in the third, when a White 3-pointer pushed Boston’s lead to 14 points and forced a New York timeout. After that stoppage, Brunson grabbed the game with two hands. He took advantage of a breakdown in Boston’s switching to drill an open stepback 3, pushed the pace in transition to blow past a cross-matched Al Horford into the lane for a layup and drew a three-shot foul on Brown that was upgraded to a flagrant-1, giving New York an extra possession — on which Bridges hit one of his patented midrange fadeaways. In just over 90 seconds, New York had whittled a 14-point deficit down to a five-point affair, with Brunson holding the knife.
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“Just the way he’s wired,” Thibodeau said after the game. “A lot of poise under pressure. His confidence I think is always super-high just because of the way he prepares and the way he works. So no moment is too big for him.”
Brunson would go on to pour in 18 points in the third, and score or assist on 16 more in the fourth, routinely working over White — whom Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla switched onto Brunson with Jrue Holiday in foul trouble — to generate good look after good look.
“It’s easier said than done,” Brunson said of the challenge of elevating his game against even an All-Defensive Team-caliber stopper. “The one thing I have to do is respect my opponent, knowing that it’s not going to be easy, knowing it’s going to be tough, and knowing that I could get got. But I’m not going to be afraid to do so. I’m going to go out there and just give it everything I got, and put myself and my team [in] the best chance to win the game. It’s as simple as that.”
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Brunson’s brilliance in making something as complicated as a hostile takeover of a playoff game seem that simple is at the heart of it all — the years of maneuvering, trades, signings and extensions, every small decision and galactic shift that put the Knicks in position to make this run this season.
It works because Brunson’s capable of producing in the fourth quarter like Kobe. It works because he’s putting up postseason numbers that put him in the company of Jordan, LeBron and Jokić. It works because, in his fourth postseason as a starter, he now has more 35-point, 10-dime playoff outings than anybody but LeBron, Jordan, Jerry West and Oscar Robertson.
It works because he does — and because, as Thibodeau’s on-court avatar, he never forgets that the work isn’t done yet, scuttling the postgame celebration with New York still one win away from the next round.
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“I was actually telling everyone to get off the court,” Brunson said after Game 4. “I was like, ‘It’s nothing to celebrate.’ … For the longest time, whenever something is accomplished, I’m looking forward to the next. It’s just how I’ve been, dating back to high school, college, championships — everything that I’ve ever won, there’s nothing in my house. Because I’m just looking forward to, ‘How can I be better?’”
Coming off their best half of the season — 70 points on 66.7% shooting against the NBA’s No. 4 regular-season defense, a 148.9 offensive rating against the defending champs — the Knicks ended Game 4 looking better than they have since this team was put together. They looked like the team Rose bet they could be.
“We have a great opportunity,” Brunson said after Game 4. “We’re playing a really good team, and I don’t think we’re playing our best basketball yet. We have a team that’s fairly new this year, and we still have a long way to go to be the best that we can be.”
One more win, and they’ll have achieved that training camp goal of surpassing last season. One more win, and they’ll play for a spot in the NBA Finals, with Brunson continuing to look forward to the next, in search of an ending worth celebrating.
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