F--- Around and Find Out
The Knicks played with their food and it cost them.
Good morning.
I hate losing to that f——— team.
Pacers 137, Knicks 134 (OT)
34-20 (L1); 21-7 at home
It wasn’t the worst loss of the season. It’s not a reason to give up on the team. It doesn’t erase all of the progress they made over the previous 10 games. It is, at the end of the day, just one loss in an 82-game season.
But I’ll be damned if this wasn’t the most annoying loss in quite some time on a variety of levels, and one which left me with an undeniably disgusted feeling in the pit of my stomach long after the final buzzer.
How do you frustrate me, oh Knickerbockers of New York? Let me count the ways…
From the opening tip, it was very clear that the Knicks were hoping to coast to victory on something like 80 percent effort on defense. The Pacers entered (and exited!) the game with the league’s 30th ranked offense, in large part because they are dead last in efficiency. Simply put, this has been not a team that hits shots at anything close to a consistent degree. New York banked on that continuing, perhaps emboldened by the extremely positive shooting luck they’ve been getting over the last three weeks.
Well, that luck finally ran out, and for just the third time all season, the Pacers took at least 40 threes and made at least 40 percent of those looks1. As Josh Hart said after the game, they were able to get comfortable early on, and once the shots started dropping, they never stopped.
Mike Brown called it a lack of physicality, which was true to an extent, but also doesn’t tell the whole story. Once the Knicks tried to flip the defensive switch, it was too late, and they were a step slow. The result was a season high 30 personal fouls, including a staggering 20 after halftime. At no time did New York ever put up genuine resistance, evinced by the worst offense in basketball surpassing 30 points in every single quarter, and then scoring the first nine points of overtime.
Besides the defense, the other thing that stood out in this game was New York’s lack of meaningful depth in comparison to Indiana. The Pacers had the likes of Quentin Jackson, Micah Potter, Ben Sheppard, Jay Huff and Kobe Brown contributing in big ways. Meanwhile, a Knicks team down three rotation players didn’t get much at all from Mo Diawara (an abysmal minus-17 in 18 minutes; I take back all the nice things I said), Ariel Hukporti (can we please sign a buyout big), Jose Alvarado (not the homecoming he wanted on either end of the court) or Jordan Clarkson (the usual). All four were negatives in the plus/minus column, while four of five Pacer bench players were a positive. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the Knicks can afford injuries to their top players less than any good team in the NBA.
But the defense and the bench are only the first two legs of my annoyance. Despite the lukewarm effort, the Knicks had plenty of chances to win this game. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to execute anywhere close to their usual level down the stretch despite plenty of opportunities to do so.
At this point, we need to have a quick sidebar, because despite the defensive issues (which, to be clear, were a team-wide problem) and yet another frustrating night from Karl-Anthony Towns (who nonetheless made the biggest play of the game, getting fouled on his put-back attempt of a missed Shamet three with 0.2 seconds remaining and sinking both free throws to send the game to overtime), Jalen Brunson seemed to receive most of the blame afterwards for commandeering the offense and missing far more shots than we’re accustomed to seeing in these situation.
So let’s go back to the videotape, shall we?
