"A Win"
One night isn't going to do away with all the questions, but the Knicks did about as well as they could do to reset this season in the correct direction
Good morning! Before we get to a fun, redemptive night at MSG, one note from after the game: Jordan Clarkson, who was not in Mike Brown’s primary rotation for the second straight game, may be shopped by the Knicks ahead of the deadline. He took the move in stride but says he still feels like he can help a team win games.
Knicks 120, Nets 66
26-18 (W1); 17-6 at home
I don’t usually like to start off postgame recaps by throwing out a bunch of numbers and hoping they tell the whole story, but I’m not sure where else to start today.
Sometimes, you just have to lean back and take it all in:
54 points was the largest margin of victory in franchise history
66 was the fewest points scored (by 12) in the NBA this season, and is the fewest points scored by an NBA team since the Mavs put up 64 points against Memphis in November of 2016.
It’s the fewest points allowed by the Knicks since they held the Wizards to 65 points in April of 2013, and is the third fewest they’ve allowed in the last 20 years.
The 59-point lead the Knicks held in the fourth quarter is their largest lead on record since the league began keeping track of play-by-play data.
Per KFS intern Jonah Kaufman, this is the 29th time in NBA history that any team has won by at least 54 points, and the difference between the Nets’ field goal percentage of 29.1 percent and the Knicks’ field goal percentage of 57.5 percent is a top 20 field goal percentage differential in NBA history.
So yeah, as far as appropriate responses go, this was about as good as you could have expected. For a team that came in with the league’s 18th ranked defense and had been better than only the Jazz in the month leading up to this game, this was an omakase of eye-popping stats where each record was more delectable than the last.
After the game, Jalen Brunson was asked what he saw from his team that he hadn’t been seeing recently, and Jalen being Jalen, he deadpanned: “A win.” Even when he expanded on a 48-hour stretch which contained soul searching and self-reflection, Brunson didn’t go into detail on the specifics that the team addressed. Watching this game though, it wasn’t hard to see where the attention went.
Defensively, this was a different basketball team than we’ve witnessed for quite some time. After the starters did a good job setting the tone across the board, the bench mob of Deuce McBride, Landry Shamet and Mitchell Robinson only upped the ante.
Everything you wanted to see on the Knicks more tenuous end of the court, you saw. Fighting around and through screens. Engaged drop coverage. Active hands. Help defenders hustling back out to shooters. Disciplined closeouts. And thank the good Lord, genuine transition defense. One game after the Mavs led 32-6 in transition points, the Knicks outscored the Nets 29-4 in that same category.
How do we know this team was challenged - either by the coaching staff or by themselves - to defend at a level previously unseen? Here’s the moment that crystalized it for me:
