The Elephant in the Room

The Knicks have a very clear problem on defense, and it's one nobody wants to talk about.

Good morning! The Knicks are back in action tonight against the Pistons at 7pm on Peacock. Detroit will be without Jalen Duren and Tobias Harris, but they had enough to beat Cleveland yesterday and continue to thrive atop the East. I’ll be doing a watchalong on the KFS YouTube channel. Hope to see everyone tonight.

The Elephant in the Room

Saturday night at 9:17 pm, midway through a dispiriting third quarter, my buddy John texted me with a simple question:

It was a fair, if obvious question. Right now, no Knicks fan is feeling the love.

Thankfully, we’re six weeks away from Valentine’s Day, so there’s still lots of time for chocolates and flowers to get back in our good graces. Better yet, the Knicks know exactly what they need to do to win back our hearts:

Play a lick of defense.

As I often do when a game has me feeling down, I went back and rewatched from the opening tip to tried and get ahold of the relevant issues. By the end of the first quarter, I’d had just about enough, but I did find the opening period to contain all the relevant data I needed.

Surprisingly enough, I had very few complaints at the outset. New York mostly defended well, with Joel Embiid and Paul George making some tough baskets along the way. Things started to break down midway through the period though, which is the first time we saw the glaring absence of something that used to be a staple: physicality.

My gut reaction upon watching this play the first time was “boy, do the Knicks miss Josh Hart.”

Indeed, New York has been out-rebounded in four of the six games Hart has missed since mid-December, but the offensive rebound here isn’t the original sin. Jalen Brunson is playing on his heels the entire possession, and eventually gets bumped several feet under the hoop as Edgecombe completes the put-back.

It soon became evident that this was going to be a long night for Brunson on the defensive end:

Same general play, same result.

This time, Brunson gets faked out before he recovers to at least get in the way of the drive, but it doesn’t matter. Edgecombe’s physicality again sends the Captain out of bounds. KAT and Mikal both have to honor their respective assignments, with OG being the guy who should have abandoned Dominick Barlow sooner as Barlow is currently shooting 19 percent from the corners.

Watching this play made me wonder if, when Brunson spoke after the game about needing to “have each other’s backs” on defense, this was the sort of play he had in mind. If you’re going to have OG Anunoby guard the least threatening opposing offensive player, it’s incumbent upon him to have an impact on plays like this¹.

Watch, by contrast, how much quicker he hits the middle of the lane on the next possession:

Even though Anunoby gets there in enough time, this play highlights a different issue, which is that OG hasn’t looked fully like OG since he came back from injury.

Before Anunoby sat out for three weeks, the Knicks had a 106.4 defensive rating when he played and a 123.7 rating when he sat. That discrepancy was among the best in the NBA. Since he’s returned though, New York is giving up 115.3 points per 100 possessions with Anunoby on the court and 113.1 when he’s off according to NBA.com. If OG isn’t going to play at an All-Defense level, this whole operation falls apart.

But let’s not lose sight of the bigger problem. We know that if KAT got beat like Brunson did on this play and then implied after the game that his teammates needed to help him out more, the pitchforks and torches would have been waiting for him before he left the Garden. Brunson mostly gets a pass because he’s, well…Jalen Brunson, but we can’t pick and choose when to hold guys accountable. Speaking of which…

When Brunson is involved, New York’s alternative to switching matchups the Knicks don’t want to switch is often for JB to hedge and recover, but much like the holding is the most important part of a reservation, the recovery is necessary for this defense to work.

Just as importantly, the player hedging should ideally do something to make the ball-handler’s life more difficult. That rarely happens when Brunson is involved, and most of the time, these plays result in a 4-on-3 advantage for the defense.

But of course we know that Jalen isn’t the only problem plaguing this unit:

If only basketball worked like gymnastics, where extra points are awarded for holding the pose, this would be a 10 out of 10:

If I was better at photoshop, I’d have put a giant sign in his hands that reads “$5.5 million doesn’t buy you what it used to.” Luckily the shot missed, but this was brutal.

Next up, I don’t mean to beat a dead horse but…

…contrast this play with what we saw defensively from Tyrese Maxey for much of this game. Like Brunson, Maxey will never be a great defender, but he gets all up in your shit and makes you earn it. Brunson’s default is the opposite, giving the opposing offensive player a runway without any physicality to speak of.

To be clear, I get why he does this. Brunson, unlike Maxey, isn’t the fleetest of foot, and its hard for him to move his feet and keep up with most advanced ball-handlers. At the same time, Jalen is stouter than most guards, yet hasn’t ever figured out how to use that frame to his advantage.

Imagine, for instance, that Brunson was playing further up on Quentin Grimes here:

The ultimate result of the play is yet another issue when Brunson is on the court: when he gets switched onto bigger players (as he momentarily does here on Adem Bona), he struggles to make an impact.

Going back to the start of the game, the alternative option to putting OG on Barlow would have been to hide Brunson there, but that opens up the possibility of crashes from the corner, which have bitten the Knicks in the ass before. Essentially, there is no such thing as fully “hiding” Jalen Brunson, not against functional NBA offenses. There’s too much talent and too much shooting for any defender to park himself on the less threatening corner shooter and watch everyone else play 4-on-4. If Brunson is on the floor, the Knicks need to find a way for him to be a healthy participant in their defense².

Lest this come off like I woke up on the wrong side of the bed and needed a new target for my frustrations after a shitty loss, the truth is that this conversation has been a long time coming, and its only because Jalen Brunson is undoubtedly my favorite Knick ever that I don’t write about it more. I’ve tiptoed around the issue for a while, but we’ve gotten to the point where it needs to be addressed.

Following this weekend’s games, New York’s defense is now an astounding 12.7 points per 100 possessions stingier when Brunson doesn’t play according to Cleaning the Glass. That is the eighth worst mark in the entire league, and the seven players below him have all played fewer than 400 total minutes. For further context, a negative 12.7-point differential is more than double Julius Randle’s worst number as a Knick.

Numbers like this aren’t always dispositive. Anthony Edwards, for instance, is the next worst prominent player on the list at +10.3, an he’s received All-Defense votes the last three seasons. But when Edwards plays with any one of the other three strong defenders who start for the Wolves, they have the equivalent of a top-10 defense or better. In other words, he pretty clearly is not holding them back from being a top notch unit.

Brunson, on the other hand, is a part of four different five-man lineups that have played at least 50 minutes. Three would rank 23rd or lower in the defensive rating rankings³. Looking at two-man combos, of the seven pairings featuring Brunson and another rotation player for at least 300 minutes, six have the equivalent of a bottom-10 defense. The lone exception is Brunson and Deuce, which has allowed just 112.7 points per 100 possessions (a top-eight number) in 386 minutes.

The fascinating part of this stat is that the five-man grouping of Brunson, McBride, Mikal, OG and KAT have hemorrhaged points more than any other regularly used Knick lineup, allowing opponents to score far more frequently than the league-worst Jazz. One logical conclusion could be that the Brunson/McBride combo works much better against opposing backup units than against starters, but at only 51 minutes, I’m not ready to write off their potential just yet.

That said, for all the talk about McBride’s potential as an on-ball stopper, we’re still talking about a 6'2” guard:

I still want to see more, and among the potential solutions to this problem, simply having a more active defenders on the floor with Jalen should probably top the list. Similarly, getting Anunoby and Bridges back to the level they were defending at earlier this season is vitally important⁴. Lastly, having a top notch backstop helps a lot. I haven’t mention Mitchell Robinson today only because Joel Embiid is a former MVP who has had his way with many a top-notch defender, but Mitch’s inconsistency and regular absences haven’t helped matters one bit.

At the end of the day though, the biggest burden falls on Brunson’s shoulders. If, as Mike Brown claims, he should seriously be considered as a potential MVP, the regularity of these breakdowns can’t continue. The Knicks have played over 500 minutes without Brunson on the court this season, and while their offense predictably falls off a cliff in those minutes, they have defended at a rate that would comfortably be second best in the NBA. Clearly, their defensive infrastructure isn’t totally unsound.

Despite all this mounting evidence, I still have hope that things will improve come playoff time. I don’t expect this group to exert April & May effort in December & January. I trust they will when the time comes.

But they need to get to April first, ideally at or near the top of the conference. To do that, they have to be better.

Not next month. Not next week.

Tonight.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1. Conspiracy Jon has long wondered whether OG is the biggest fan of JB, and can’t shake the fact that he looked like a kid on Christmas morning for the entire month Brunson was out last year. And that’s fine. Not everyone in a locker room has to be best friends. But this stuff should never get in the way of making the correct basketball play.

2. This is one of the reasons that I don’t think this is a problem that can be addressed by trade. And if you’re tempted to place the blame on KAT, think again. When Brunson plays without Towns, New York’s defense is actually 3.4 points per 100 possessions worse than when the two share the court. Towns, meanwhile, has stellar defensive numbers when he plays without JB, to the tune of a 108.7 defensive rating according to Cleaning the Glass. Overall, the Knicks are a better defensive team when KAT plays than when he doesn’t. Even more impressively, New York has roughly a league-average D when Towns plays without Anunoby and the equivalent of a top-two defense when KAT plays without Bridges. Quite literally every metric points to Towns being a positive presence on the defensive end this season.

3. The only one with a strong defense, it may surprise you, is the lineup of Brunson, Shamet, Bridges, Anunoby and Towns. They had a defensive rating that would rank third in the NBA, albeit in just 54 minutes.

4. I mentioned this on the Sixers postgame, but Bridges went from seemingly having three or four stocks every game to averaging just one steal and half a block since the beginning of December.