Best In Show

The Knicks defense - formerly one of the worst units in basketball - is suddenly carrying them to victory.

Good morning! Sorry for the later than usual edition. Three games in four nights may not have caught up with the Knicks, but it certainly kicked the ass of your humble author. Thankfully, the wins just keep on comin’…

Knicks 127, Blazers 97

Don’t let the final point total fool you:

This was not an offensive masterpiece by the Knicks.

Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges combined for 50 points and shot 9-of-24 inside the arc. The starting unit as a whole again had some rough stretches, putting up a 102.6 offensive rating on the night, a number that would rank dead last in the NBA by a healthy margin. In a nearly four-minute stretch to end the first half, they didn’t score a single point. With just 75 points more than two thirds of the way through the third quarter, breaking 100 didn’t seem guaranteed.

And yet unlike so many games they played over the first half of the season when it felt like the Knicks needed to score on every trip down the court just to stay in the game, there was little doubt they could weather this storm.

For the first time all season, and maybe for the first time in years, they are winning games with defense.

All of the attention has centered on the last five games, during which they’ve held teams to under 100 points four times, including the last three in a row, but this turnaround may have started quite a bit earlier. When New York was decimated by the Pistons on January 5, the 121 points the Knicks gave up was the third fewest they allowed over the previous nine games. If we go back even further, they didn’t hold a single opponent below 111 points over the 13-game stretch from December 13 to January 5.

Since that shellacking in Detroit, just one of the dozen teams they’ve played has topped 114, and it took a fairly ridiculous shooting performance from Steph & Co. to make that happen.