It’s time to sink or swim.
Following Jalen Brunson’s late-game exit due to an ankle injury Thursday night, the New York Knicks looked completely clueless in the final minute and a half of overtime against the Los Angeles Lakers.
Their incompetence down the stretch without Brunson, the NBA’s most clutch player this season, cost them a much-needed and potentially narrative-shifting win against one of the hottest teams in the league.
It also confirmed an ugly truth that New York fans haven’t wanted to confront until it became an undeniable reality—without Jalen Brunson, the Knicks’ ceiling is severely limited.
New York followed their loss to the Lakers with another L to the cross-town Clippers the next night, this time without Brunson for the entirety of the game, as he had been ruled out for at least two weeks earlier in the day.
Once again, the Knicks find themselves facing a tough situation. And despite their 133-104 bounce-back win against the Sacramento Kings Monday night, this “situation” feels a little more dire.
Brunson has been the unequivocal face of New York basketball since the Knicks first swept him away from the Dallas Mavericks in the 2022 offseason with a 4-year, $104 million contract.
The savior. Their guy.
The one who didn’t shy away from the challenge as so many others have before him.
As a result, the Knicks have been perennial playoff participants for the first time since the turn of the millennium, and Madison Square Garden has reached energy levels it hasn’t seen since that very same time.
The return on investment on Brunson has been everything the Knicks could have asked for and then some. The guy even gave them an unprecedented bargain when he looked the other way on an additional $113 million while signing a 4-year extension in the 2024 off-season to help field a better overall roster.
So, the Knicks learned to be competitive again on the back of Jalen Brunson. However, now he’s out with what could be his longest in-season absence since coming to the Big Apple.
They fielded a better team around him, but perhaps too much focus was on him and not enough on how they could fare without him.
Leon Rose has brought in the personnel following the Jalen Brunson signing—Josh Hart, OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges, and Karl-Anthony Towns—are undeniably talented but have their share of weaknesses. The worry is that, without Brunson, these weaknesses might become overwhelming.
Karl-Anthony Towns
KAT is a bona fide superstar, though the whistle he gets from referees might try to convince you otherwise. With Brunson out, Towns is now the Knicks’ best player, which means he needs to start acting like it.
He’s already off to a good start, attempting the most field goals on the team in New York’s first Brunson-less game against the Clippers. But it doesn’t stop there.
Towns likes to refer to himself as the “greatest big man shooter of all time“, and the numbers more or less back that statement up. He already has the most three-pointers made by a Knicks center in a single season, a feat that took him just 48 games to accomplish.
Recently, however, it seems as though Towns has been leaning too heavily on his outside shot to get his game going. When that fails, it takes him out of focus in other regards.
Towns took a total of 13 field attempts against the Lakers, with six of them being from beyond the arc – nearly half. He finished the game, a four-point loss for New York, with 12 points on 23% FG and 16.7% 3PT.
This isn’t to say he should stop shooting altogether; that’d be asinine for a player with his skillset to do. Sometimes, you just need to see a couple of the easy ones go in before you take a step (or two) back.
Towns hasn’t been the undisputed first option on any of his teams since the pre-Anthony Edwards days in Minnesota. How he responds to his first extended assignment in the role in nearly five years will be indicative of how the Knicks will look should Jalen Brunson miss serious time.
Mikal Bridges
Mikal Bridges has been the subject of many conversations among Knicks fans this season. Did you know he was traded for five firsts and a pick swap?
At times, he looks worthy of such a haul (e.g., Christmas Day). At other times, you can’t tell whether or not he’s on the floor. He needs to at least find a middle ground somewhere in there.
Bridges was brought in by the Knicks to form a defensive wing tandem with OG Anunoby, which fans quickly dubbed “WingStop.” He also holds the current mantle of NBA Iron Man (never having missed a game in his career), a streak that Bridges says even goes back to his high school days.
On the surface, this seems like a match made in Heaven between a player and Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau, who himself has garnered a reputation for defense and minute-heavy rotations. As the stats will tell you, though, only half of this equation has come to fruition.
As things stand now, New York currently ranks 15th in defensive rating, dead center of the league.
Via PBPStats, in the 885 minutes where the Knicks starting five has shared the court this year, they post a net rating of 2.81 (120.01 OffRtg, 117.20 DefRtg). In the 123 minutes where Bridges is off the floor but the remaining starters are on, the Knicks’ net rating skyrockets to 32.59 (139.43 OffRtg, 106.84 DefRtg), by far the highest of any combination of lineups featuring their starters.
Bridges’ performance at times this season has been unfairly measured in comparison to the package given up for him, but he simply has to be better.
With Bridges being the most capable of creating his own shot out of any of the Knicks’ starters sans Brunson, the Knicks should use him more as an initiator rather than a spot-up guy. This will hopefully lead to him being engaged on both sides of the ball more consistently.
OG Anunoby
OG has the easiest adjustment to make out of any of the Knicks, in that he should actually be doing less (on offense).
Anunoby is one of the top 3-and-D players in the NBA. Point blank, period. He’s at his peak when he can focus on the best opposing player on defense while only having to worry about hitting catch-and-shoot threes on the other end. He largely plays this role to the best of his ability.
The issue arises the second Anunoby has to take more than a single dribble on offense.
Per NBA.com, Anunoby is shooting 48.6% from the field and 37.2% from three when he takes 0 dribbles beforehand. These numbers jump to 52.9% FG and 40.7% 3PT with one dribble, likely because OG uses it to set his feet on shots or take one large stride into the lane from the perimeter.
Two dribbles, though? Back down to 48.0% from the field and an astonishingly low 14.3% from three.
Between 3-6 dribbles, which Anunoby has the second-highest frequency of taking before any of his field goals (15.6%), he shoots an even lower percentage once again at 38.9% from the field and 10.0% from beyond the arc.
With Brunson out and the Knicks needing to take on more ball-handling responsibilities as a unit, they definitely should NOT be looking to OG Anunoby for it. Less is more.
Josh Hart
Josh Hart is a self-proclaimed “bat out of hell” and the motor of the Knicks, but he’ll need to bring more than his usual chaotic energy to the floor if New York wants to keep their heads above water without Brunson.
Since Jan. 1, Hart is shooting 23.5 percent from beyond the arc. In layman’s terms, that’s garbage.
Potentially worse than Hart’s poor shooting percentage, and certainly contributing to it, is his body language whenever he gets the ball on the perimeter, regardless of how wide-open he is.
Opposing teams know that Hart doesn’t want to shoot the ball because he’s already decided that he doesn’t want to before it’s reached his hands. It’s often a last resort for him. This eliminates him from the opponent’s defensive game plan on the perimeter before the game even starts, allowing them to load up bodies elsewhere.
Simply shooting with more confidence would draw defenses toward Hart and away from the Knicks’ actual offensive threats from three. Fake it till you make it, literally.
It’s also not as though Hart has been a completely incapable shooter throughout his career. He shot 39.6% from three on 3.1 attempts per game during his rookie season with the Lakers, which isn’t nothing.
He shot a career-high 6.4 three-point attempts and hit 37.3% of them in the 13 games he played for the Trailblazers following his trade from New Orleans in the 2021-2022 season.
Most recently and remarkably, Hart shot 51.9% (!!!) from three-point territory in the 25 games he played for the Knicks directly after being traded from Portland in 2023. The catch is that it was only on 2.1 attempts a night, but it still shows that the ability is there, and I believe it starts with confidence.
Miles McBride
Last but not least, the man who’s actually going to have to step into Jalen Brunson’s shoes while he’s out. I know I didn’t mention him in the initial four, but he still deserves a shout, no?
In Miles “Deuce” McBride’s now nearly four-year career, he’s started a total of 21 out of 226 games, many of which weren’t even with him as the “true” point guard. Now, he’s being thrown into the fire.
While it’s challenging to replicate the performance of an All-World player like Brunson regularly with such little experience in a role like his, McBride doesn’t necessarily have to do that for the Knicks to remain competitive.
We shouldn’t be viewing this through a “How can McBride compare to Brunson?” lens, but rather a “How is McBride going to look in his first extended action as a starting NBA point guard?” lens. It’ll be much more fun and much less stressful to look at it as a new-found opportunity for one of the Knicks’ last homegrown products.
McBride is averaging career highs in minutes, points, rebounds, assists, FGA, 3PA, and FTA this season. It’s safe to assume that at least one of these averages will go up with Brunson out.
He’s off to a rocky start so far, finishing with just seven points and six assists on 15.4% (2-13) shooting from the floor and 22.2% (2-9) from three against the Clippers. The silver lining is that he recorded just one turnover to those six assists.
I’d say chalk it up to growing pains in a new role and forget about it.
