Falling into Place
Let's take a data-driven deep dive into KAT's recent turnaround.
Good morning! Before we get to today’s newsletter, please note that tomorrow’s newsletter may arrive a bit later than usual. Today is my amazing wife’s birthday, and she takes precedent over the other love of my life. Hopefully the Knicks give her a nice present in Cleveland.
Falling into Place
The shots are finally going in.
Can it really be that simple?
Can a player who has ranked in the 79th percentile or higher for efficiency in seven of his previous 10 seasons (and never ranked below the 60th percentile) but who was hovering around league-average until just before the All-Star break suddenly break out of a slump that lasted 50 games? With no rhyme or reason as to why?
Or perhaps the better question: is this real, or has this recent stretch been nothing more than a blip on the radar?
We’ll need a larger sample size to know the answer with any certainty, but as I detailed yesterday, the recent performance of Karl-Anthony Towns has been night and day from what came before it. With that in mind, I thought we might spend some time today examining what, if anything, has been different lately in the hope that the answer might uncover whether the recent hot streak is here to stay.
To do that, we must first go back to what happened immediately before this bounce back began. Following KAT’s “cut me, Mick” comeback against the Nuggets when he looked more energized than he has all season, Towns came back down to earth against Boston, making just 3-of-9 shots from the field and missing the only two 3-pointers he attempted. He was more involved the two nights later against Indiana, but shot just 8-for-17 from the field and did not attempt a field goal in his final six minutes of play.
That Pacers loss, you’ll remember, was marred by accusations that Jalen Brunson commandeered the late-game offense to the Knicks’ detriment. KAT woefully underperformed against the likes of Jay Huffelpuff and Harry Micah Potter, but it doesn’t change the fact that New York probably could have benefited from Towns seeing the ball more down the stretch before fouling out.
On that note, while Towns has been a positive offensive force all season, his impact has kicked into high gear over the last month. In New York’s last 15 games (during which they’ve posted a 117.3 offensive rating overall), the Knicks are scoring 121.2 points per 100 possessions with KAT on the court and just 107.4 when he’s been off. That difference of 13.8 points is more than double the next largest on/off discrepancy (Landry Shamet, at +6.8).
Perhaps with these metrics in mind, Jalen Brunson came out in full facilitator mode in their next game against Philly, Coincidentally or otherwise, of Brunson’s four assists, three went Towns way. JB has racked up eight more assists to KAT in the three games since. Compare those 11 dimes in four games to the 40 assists that came in the prior 44 games they played together, and it seems pretty clear that Jalen is making something of an effort to get his fellow All-Star more involved.
That’s part of the reason to be hopeful this stretch has legs. The other came against Houston on Saturday night, and specifically, how KAT’s offense got going that evening:
