Design Flaw?

The Knicks' defense was lit up again on Friday night. Is it their scheme? Or did they just have a bad night?

Good morning! Today’s newsletter is so jam-packed with clips that it’s pushing the limits of Substack’s capabilities, so let’s cut the preamble and get right to it. If you’re not a full-subscriber, you can change that right now to get the KFS Newsletter five days per week at just $5 a month or $50 a year:

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Game Night

TONIGHT: Raptors at Knicks, 7:30

Injury Report: The big news of the weekend is that Mitchell Robinson is OUT for this game, while it appears that Jalen Brunson will be good to go even though he’s listed as QUESTIONABLE. Robinson missed most of the second half Friday night with an ankle injury that didn’t have an obvious origin, but stated yesterday that he took a wrong step about a week ago. Apparently he exacerbated the injury in Boston. X-rays were negative, but otherwise the severity of the injury is unknown.

As for Brunson, he appeared to sprain his left ankle in the final minute of Friday’s loss, which had many questioning why he was still in a game that had gotten out of control. It appears Thibs will escape any serious repercussions though, as the head coach said yesterday that Brunson is “good.”

Halftime Zoom: Here’s the link for tonight

What to watch for: In their last two games, the Knicks gave up more total points over consecutive contests (279) than they have in any two-game span since January of 1979, when they allowed 286 in two losses to the Bucks and Lakers.

Notably, the Raptors are not in the same class as Bucks and Celtics.

Still, I will be watching for any semblance of defense in this game, especially with their best defender sidelined.

Speaking of defense…

Game 21: Knicks 122, Boston 133

Wait, I think KP just hit another open three…

In a New York minute…

In basically a repeat of the Bucks game, the Knicks’ defense sprung more leaks than the Titanic and allowed Boston’s offense to get into a flow early and often, giving up 74 in the first half three nights after allowing Milwaukee to hit 75 in the same span. Even so, it was a mostly tight game through two and a half quarters until a 10-0 run pushed the lead to 20. New York cut the advantage to seven on a Josh Hart triple midway through the fourth, but the fake comeback stalled out from there,

Three Things

Not today there aren’t. Today, there’s only one thing. Except it’s also kinda three things, because the one thing - Why did Boston light up the Knicks like a Christmas tree from behind the arc? - is about threes, so do with that what you will.

By now you’ve all seen replays of the first shot of the game, which was like the definition of insanity playing out on a basketball court:

From quite literally the opening moments of the first game this season, we’ve seen the Knicks get burned by something so plainly obvious that it begs the question, “what, precisely, do they think is going to happen here?”

The scheme in question - one we’ve come to know and at times loath - is drop coverage, which happens after a ball-screen when the center “drops” towards the basket with the goal of preventing a drive. It’s the tactic that has put Mitchell Robinson squarely in the All-Defense conversation this season because there might not be a better center in the league when it comes to playing drop. It’s also helped the Knicks as a whole, who still rank 9th in the NBA in defense despite giving up approximately 8,592 points in the last two games.

But as the sport has evolved and more and more centers are firing away from deep, many coaches have reconsidered the use of drop coverage.

Many coaches…but not Tom Thibodeau.

Thibs, as we know, is a creature of habit, but it’s not because he’s old and grumpy. If anything, he’s the card shark who lives at the blackjack table and knows exactly when to hit and when to stay on every hand. His gamble here is that the odds are still in New York’s favor if he lets centers fire away from great distances, and that’s because while many big men can shoot threes, most of them aren’t comfortable doing it on enough volume to the point that it’ll benefit their team.

Kristaps Porzingis, unfortunately, is not most centers. There’s a reason why the rest of the league let out a collective “oh shit” when the Celtics got him. When healthy, this is not an offense that can be stopped by any conventional defense. Drop, and he’s comfortable enough firing away to make you pay. Switch, and you suddenly have a very large human being guarded by a smaller human. In the case of the Knicks, who have five rotation players between 6'2" and 6'5", it is often a much smaller human.

Sure enough, New York did wind up switching some as this game wore on, and sure enough, KP made them pay a few times.

But - and stay with me here, because we’re about to get into some truly lofty levels of basketball nerd-level analysis - three is still more than two.

I know what Tom Thibodeau would say in response to this (or at least I think I do). For as much as it might not seem like it after the last two games, the easiest shots are still ones that come at the rim. He’s not wrong, and he has the data to back it up. The Knicks have ranked 4th, 11th, 19th and currently 9th in defensive rating during his tenure. More importantly, their defense in both postseasons has been exceptional.

That’s part of Thibodeau’s bet. Sphincters tighten in April, May, and God willing one day before I die, June. By developing and honing solid principles over the course of the season and then maxing out effort when the playoffs begin, the scales start to tip in your favor.

But they need to get there first. Not only that, but the teams they’ll have to go through are the same two teams who just took them behind the woodshed, and are the two teams who are as battle-tested as any in big games (one of which just added perhaps the league’s pre-eminent closer).

This is all to say that for as much as we can and probably should write both of these games off to some extent, there’s also a depressing reality that has set in: the reason New York was 0-2 in the IST has very little to do with the absence of a mythical superstar player to be added later. Defensively, they just didn’t have an answer.

Against Milwuakee, that was the result of some truly obscene shooting that probably won’t ever happen again. Also, while Brook Lopez is a good stretch five, he doesn’t scare the Knicks, and the results (on the Lopez front at least) have proven tenable in regard to that stance.

Boston is a different animal altogether.

That unfortunate fact showed itself in the form of 47 mostly good looks from three which I’ve taken the liberty of categorizing for today’s newsletter. Category No. 1 were 3-point attempts given up purely because of the scheme. The clip above is a good example of this (although credit also goes to Derrick White, whose cut forced Jalen Brunson to jump the wrong way instead of helping on Porzingis).

Category No. 2 is a mix of scheme and effort:

Normally, you’d say this is a lazy-ass closeout by Mitchell Robinson, but it takes on a bit of a different feeling with the news yesterday that he may have actually injured his ankle a week ago. Whatever the reason, this is an objectively poor contest.

Yes, Mitch does what he’s supposed to do at first, which to shade towards the driver. But Julius Randle was also in a perfect defensive stance having walled off Jaylen Brown’s drive.

Brown had the option of dribbling left, which the Knicks would have certainly welcomed, or tried to cross up Julius and go middle. Mitch’s help positioning here dissuades him from doing that, but at too high a cost.

Part of what has made Robinson’s year so special is that he is often in two places at once. Here, not only is he probably a half step too close to Brown, but he’s in anything but “ready” position to jump out for a contest after the pass. It’s almost as if the very player to his left hadn’t repeatedly lit him up in these exact sorts of plays throughout the season. Go figure.

Next up is Category No. 3, which is where we see a blend of scheme, effort and execution combining for the misstep:

As usual, Mitchell Robinson is in drop, but unlike many of the night’s most frustrating plays, it wasn’t Porzingis who took the shot here. Instead, this play featured an off-ball screen, which calls for Brown’s defender to navigate the pick and still offer up a decent contest.

Brown’s man, of course, is Julius Randle. Julius always gets the matchup on Brown because out of everyone on Boston’s fearsome starting five, he’s the one the Knicks likely fear the least as an outside shooter. In addition to that, Brown’s off-ball movement is the least threatening of the group, and getting Randle involved in a screening action of any kind is usually a win for the opposition.

We see that here. Not only does Randle get hung up on the screen, but he stagnates afterwards to compound the issue. I could see letting Brown shoot being a part of New York’s game plan, but there’s a difference between tough shots and practice shots. Julius, giving several feet of space with his hands down, gives up a practice shot.

Next we have Category No. 4, which is where the effort was fine, but the scheme wasn’t executed properly.

If you’ve watched literally any Knicks game in the past four seasons (and truthfully, almost any NBA game), you’ve seen something like this, where a defender will sprint out from the paint towards a corner shooter ready to heave it up. It happens on an especially great deal of Knicks possessions because, again, rim attempts are bad, and keeping a low man in the paint prevents these sorts of shots from happening.

The issue here isn’t effort. As Tatum is dancing at the top of the arc, Brunson is bouncing around, seemingly ready for whatever might come his way. That’s not the problem.

But watch Brunson as the ball swings to Brown. For one, he’s in the middle of the lane as opposed to having one foot in the paint, which would have been more than sufficient even given the coverage. Making matters worse, he starts his mad dash to Derrick White a half second too late, giving Boston’s guard all the time he needed to fire away. This play was a sign of things to come for Jalen, who had one of his worst defensive games of the season as the Celtics picked on him mercilessly. More importantly, this play was a perfect example of how anything less than perfect execution and near maximum effort isn’t going to be sufficient against this team.

The most notable part for me is that the four shots I clipped were also the first four 3-point attempts of the game, thus allowing Boston to get into a rhythm. The fifth was another from White, but it was one where you just had to tip your cap. That brings us to Category No. 5, good defense:

OK, maybe “good” is being a bit too kind. It’s fine for Brunson to go under the screen; it’s not fine for him to go under with such ferocity that making it back to the shooter is a virtual impossibility.

But if White - who prior to this game had made a dozen pull up triples in 17 games - is going to pull out a crossover and drain a sidestep three, to some extent you simply tip your cap.

Going through all 47 of Boston’s 3-point attempts in this game, there were 17 possessions that I consider to be solid defense, the vast majority of which resulted in misses.

But out of the other 30, I tallied another 17 possessions that I considered to be a breakdown in execution in some form or fashion. After that, I clocked eight instances where the scheme was executed properly and the gamble simply failed, three where the effort wasn’t nearly good enough, and two where it was some combo of effort, execution and scheme to blame.

The end result were a lot of possessions like this…

…where a wide-open three is the end result, and yet you look back at the possession itself, and there wasn’t a glaring finger of blame to point at anyone.

The most obvious culprit here is Brunson, who is taken out of the play after he goes above the screen. That, in turn, creates a five-on-four situation, or more accurately, a four on three, because by this point Mitchell Robinson was petrified of straying too far off KP above the arc.

Once Hart has to abandon his man in the corner to provide the help, Grimes is left to defend two men, and simply realizes it too late.

There are gripes here - Brunson’s screen navigation, Hart being a tad overaggressive with Randle also there in help position, and Grimes not being ready to make the appropriate rotation - which is why I placed it in the “execution” column.

But think about how perfect the Knicks would have to have been to prevent the three here, versus how easy this looked for a Boston team whose resident MVP candidate wasn’t even on the court. That’s how big of an impact a truly potent stretch five can have when surrounded by a group of solid shooters and ball movers (and how detrimental it can be to have a subpar defender - Brunson - without a safe hiding spot).

Sometimes the stretch five doesn’t even need to do any stretching to make the impact:

On this play, Robinson stays with the action instead of following KP, and then immediately after he leaves Porzingis, he gets hung up on a Jaylen Brown screen. With RJ in pursuit, DiVincenzo needing to wall off the driver, and Randle needing to guard the rim with KP rolling, it’s actually up to Mitch to recover to a wide-open Horford in the corner. His circuitous route gives Al the most open look he had all game, but he’d never have needed to travel it in the first place if Porzingis didn’t pull him so far from the paint.

As Benjy noted after the game, the better play here is for Robinson to go with KP instead of treating it like a normal pick & roll, and for DiVincenzo and Barrett to switch, but both of these aren’t things the Knicks do with any level of comfort or regularity. Boston’s success on Friday night was as much a result of them getting New York out of its comfort zone as anything else. This play exemplifies how much undue stress their offense can put on an ill-equipped defense.

(We also have to tip the cap to Tatum, who shows just how much he’s evolved as a passer over the course of his career.)

By the end of this game, Boston got access to the cookie jar whenever they set any semblance of a screen involving Porzingis:

This look didn’t go down, but it was as open a shot as KP had all night.

The onus here was pretty clearly on Randle to switch back onto tingus pingus, but again, it’s not like this is the first time a team has taken advantage of Julius not knowing where he’s supposed to be. The difference here is that they have the personnel to make New York pay.

Last one, mercilessly:

Here, it’s RJ staying with Tatum for too long that gets the dominoes falling.

I thought Barrett was the Knicks’ best defender on balance. He did an admirable job on Tatum, and even here, it’s hard to fully blame him for not wanting to leave his big man on an island - not only because Tatum is freaking awesome, but because it simply isn’t in this team’s DNA to play the sort of defense that gives you a prayer against these Celtics.

Again, as Benjy noted, the Knicks played so many possessions in between their normal approach (drop) and what this game required (switching). In trying to have their cake and eat it too, they got neither.

Moving forward, I’m not sure what they do. Thankfully, they only play the Celtics two more times, including on the final Thursday of the regular season. No other team is equipped to exploit them to this degree.

But perhaps, as we continually focus on which superstar might become available in a trade, we can leave a little room for another question of near equal importance: How are they supposed to guard an unguardable team in their own division that doesn’t appear to be going away anytime soon?

💫 Stars of the Game 💫

⭐️ Quentin Grimes: Responded as well as anyone could have expected after being demoted from the starting five. Grimes finished with as many field goals (five) as he had in the previous seven games combined. He was more assertive and more active, and benefited from actually having a few plays called for him

⭐️ ⭐️ Isaiah Hartenstein: Made the Celtics sweat a bit. He seems to be far more comfortable defending their offense than Robinson, at least for the moment.

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ RJ Barrett: His best game since coming back from injury, RJ had a lot of success in the paint, and especially the short midrange, where he was patient and effective throughout the evening. Had some nice passes too. He finished with 23 points on 9-of-16 shooting.

Tip-Ins…

🏀 The Knicks had a 122.5 offensive rating over the last two games against a Celtics defense that is 3rd in the league and a Bucks team that has been quietly respectable after their awful start. The offense was not the problem.

Final Thought

Zoom in, and this feels like DEFCON 5. Zoom out, and the Knicks just lost two road games against genuine contenders who combined to hit 49 percent of their threes. Both featured single digit deficits in the fourth quarter.

All is not lost.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”