Do or Die

Let's look at what's at stake in whatever is left of New York's season.

Good morning. The Knicks look to keep their season going at home tonight against Indiana, but they may be without Karl-Anthony Towns, who is being listed as questionable with a left knee contusion. Tip off is at 8pm on TNT. Come say hi on what might be the final halftime zoom of the season.

Do or Die

I didn’t really know where to go with today’s newsletter.

The season isn’t over yet, so I wanted to hold off on any big picture / offseason stuff for the moment. 13 teams have pulled off what the Knicks are now attempting to do, including one team 28 years ago that we still deserve some karmic retribution from. It can be done, even if the vast majority of people reading this (and the guy writing it) doesn’t believe it’ll happen. KAT’s injury doesn’t make the task any easier.

I also wasn’t sure how valuable it would be to go back and look at the film from Game 4 and try to pinpoint areas of improvement.

The biggest reason they lost - 17 turnovers - resulted mostly from inexplicable brain farts that have nothing to do with X’s and O’s. They’re also somewhat uncharacteristic. Hart’s five turnovers tied his fourth highest total as a Knick, and the team’s 17 turnovers tied the third highest total in the 45 playoff games they’ve played with Tom Thibodeau as their coach. The Knicks were the sixth stingiest team in the league this season when it came to taking care of the ball.

Hell, avoiding turnovers is literally the third tenet of the banner that hangs in New York’s practice facility, with the terms “Basketball IQ,” “Concentration” and “Poise Under Pressure” not far below:

While some of those core tenets read line one-liners at the Comedy Cellar today, the Knicks have actually done a good job of taking care of the ball in the postseason, giving it away only slightly more than their regular season average. They just picked the wrong time to lose their heads.

We can talk about the transition defense that followed some of those giveaways, although holding Indy to 20 points off 17 turnovers is actually commendable. The Pacers averaged 130.4 points per 100 transition possessions in the regular season - good for the fourth best mark in basketball - and have upped that mark to 136.0 in the playoffs. In that sense, New York’s transition defense was above board.

And yet, when you watch the lack of urgency displayed in the opening 90 seconds of game action…

…its hard to be very forgiving.

We can talk about the offense, and how it isn’t doing a good enough job maximizing the talents of the individual players, but New York has produced offensive ratings of 127.4, 121.1, and most recently 118.6 in their three losses. All three of those marks would rank as the second best offense in the playoffs behind only the Cavaliers, who gobsmacked the Heat with a 136.2 rating before being knocked down to earth by these same Pacers¹.

Going down the line and putting aside turnovers, Jalen Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby and Josh Hart put up good & efficient individual outings in Game 4, as they have throughout this series for the most part. Even Mikal Bridges (more on him to come, I promise) and his 47.8 effective field goal percentage are clear of true disaster zone territory, instead wallowing about in the muck of just plain bad.

That only leaves one place to go, and we’ve already done that topic to death. The half court defense stunk yet again whenever New York’s two worst defenders shared the floor. After sporting a 125.5 defensive rating in 25:51 on Tuesday night, JB and KAT are now giving up 130.2 points per 100 possessions in 91 minutes of shared court time in the series. Even worse, their offensive rating is 111.2 - second worst of any two-man combo that has played at least 50 minutes together (more on this to come as well).

In the 46 minutes Towns has played without Brunson, New York is a plus-22, with a 122.5 offensive rating and a 96.7 defensive rating. After a disastrous defensive performance last night, the Brunson/no Towns lineups have dropped much closer to equilibrium, but New York is still winning those minutes with a positive 2.9 net rating.

We should probably spend a few minutes on said disaster, and how poorly the hedge and recover scheme fared even though it is being employed specifically to make life manageable on the defensive end when Jalen is in the game.

Mission, umm…not accomplished.

This naturally leads us to the place where the buck stops for many Knick fans, as the overt resistance to allowing Jalen Brunson to simply switch these actions is one of a laundry list of Thibs-related complaints.

From the defensive scheme to the various lineup and rotation decisions and everything in between, it seems like the chickens are finally coming home to roost for a coach who treats the regular season like the playoffs and may be paying the price for his lack of experimentation and variety during the first 82 games.

Excuses are few and far between. This time around, injuries aren’t to blame, nor is cold shooting or uncharacteristic hot shooting by the opponent (although who knows where the conversation would be today if Aaron Nesmith doesn’t have an out-of-body experience in the closing minutes of regulation in Game 1). Even the depth questions have been somewhat neutered by strong bench performances in this series.

If the Knicks lose tonight, they will have earned that loss fair & square and completely by their own volition.

The only questions left relate to what happens if they do.

On that note, here are the three biggest things I’ll be wondering and looking for over whatever remaining minutes the Knicks have left in their season:

🏀 Can Thibs do enough to save his job? …which is notably different from asking whether Tom Thibodeau will do enough to get fired.