Knicks vs. Pacers: New York will need stops to even the series — can Jalen Brunson stand his ground?

Yahoo

a day ago

INDIANAPOLIS — Ask any basketball coach to explain to you, minutes after a heated game wraps up, what exactly just happened out there and why it did, and they're probably going to tell you that they won't know for sure until they go back and watch the film. Until then, all they can do is offer broad generalizations. (Also, spoiler alert: Even after they watch the film, they're not going to tell you what they saw.)
So it was that, as Rick Carlisle sat down at the podium in the interview room at Gainbridge Fieldhouse shortly after Sunday's final buzzer and fielded a question about why his Indiana Pacers had scored only 42 points in the second half of a fall-from-ahead 106-100 loss to the New York Knicks in Game 3 of the 2025 Eastern Conference finals, the venerable head coach's first draft of an explanation trended toward big-picture analysis.
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'Well, they had a lot of their better defenders in the game in the second half,' Carlisle said. 'That makes it harder.'
Left unsaid, of course: The Knicks didn't have one of their worse defenders in there as often. The one who wears No. 11, who just made All-NBA for the second straight season — and the one who gives the Pacers a bullseye to try to target whenever they've got the ball.
(Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
'When teams hunt me … I mean, it is what it is,' Jalen Brunson said during New York's Monday media availability. 'Obviously, I'm going to give my effort. I'm gonna give everything I have. I've just got to be smart and not foul, and I think if I just keep my body in the right position and contest shots, and foul or not foul — or not [do something the referees] perceive as a foul — I'll put my team in a better chance to win.'
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With his back against the wall, down 2-0 and heading on the road, Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau not only shuffled his starting five — in went Mitchell Robinson, out went Josh Hart — but also reached deep into his bench, finding guards Landry Shamet (who'd played a total of 31 minutes in this postseason prior to Sunday) and Delon Wright (who'd logged just 3 1/2) at the back of the cupboard. To some degree, the referees' whistles forced Thibodeau's hand: With Brunson and Miles McBride both picking up multiple early fouls, the Knicks needed more backcourt options, especially with backup point guard Cameron Payne largely ineffective in this series.
To some degree, though, Thibs rolled with those guards — including McBride, once he got back into the game in the second half — because they were giving New York precisely what it needed: more size, better communication ('Early, loud, continuous talk,' Shamet called it in the locker room), tighter rotations and a stronger overall defensive spine against a Pacers team that had been carving the Knicks up through two and a half games.
'They weren't getting any shots early in the clock,' Knicks forward OG Anunoby said Monday. 'We were making them work each possession and take shots [at the] end of clock, and just making them uncomfortable. … I think [the switching and rotations are] getting better and better each game. The Pacers, they play very fast, so sometimes it gets hard when a lot of things are going on, but the communication has picked up. I think it's getting better and better.'
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The Knicks were down by 13 points when Brunson, toting four fouls, checked out with 1:39 to go in the third quarter. They'd clawed to within three when Brunson checked back in with 8:48 to go in the fourth, thanks to an explosive start to the last stanza from Karl-Anthony Towns and to superior defensive effort. Just a minute and 45 seconds later, Brunson picked up his fifth guarding Andrew Nembhard in transition, sending him back to the bench and bringing McBride back in … at which point the Knicks resumed grinding the Pacers down, with the quintet of Towns, McBride, Hart, Anunoby and Mikal Bridges holding the Pacers to 3-for-10 shooting over the next 5 1/2 minutes before Brunson checked back in with 97 seconds to go.
That Thibodeau kept Brunson on the bench for so long in a must-win one-possession game, even with five fouls, arched some eyebrows. He'd later say Brunson's extended absence owed partly to a lack of feel for how the referees were calling the game, and a sense that he couldn't risk a sixth foul given how much he'd need Brunson down the stretch — a feeling confirmed when Brunson checked back in and promptly hit what would prove to be the game-winning runner.
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'Time and score, you know?' Thibodeau said after the Game 3 win. 'And just trying to get it to the point where you felt like, 'OK, what do we need in the game right now?' And the group was sort of in a good rhythm, so we probably went a little bit longer than normal.'
Some of it, though, boiled down to a simple fact: The Knicks needed stops. And those tend to be easier to get with Brunson off the floor.
Most advanced metrics peg Brunson — listed at 6-foot-1 with a 6-foot-4 wingspan, lacking elite foot speed or feel for screen navigation — as a below-average defender. Some, like estimated plus-minus, put him near, or at, the very bottom of the league.
Over the course of the regular season, the Knicks allowed 8.1 more points per 100 possessions with Brunson on the court than off of it. In the postseason, that's up to 17.9 more points-per-100. Against Indiana? An eye-popping 25.9 points-per-100, as Carlisle and on-court avatar Tyrese Haliburton have repeatedly sought Brunson out to emphasize his defensive weaknesses in hopes of mitigating his overwhelming offensive strengths.
Through three games the Knicks have allowed the Pacers to score 27 points in 23 possessions finished on which Brunson was guarding the pick-and-roll ball-handler, according to Synergy Sports tracking — 1.174 points per possession, a mark that would rank near the very bottom of the league over the course of the full season. And that figure doesn't account for the countless trips on which Carlisle, Haliburton and Co. have also looked to attack Brunson in other ways: by taking advantage of him as a low man who won't pose much of a threat as a help defender on drives; by running early drag screens in transition to poke at the Knicks' hedge-and-recover strategy and see what lanes might open up behind the initial coverage; through multiple-screen possessions that force him to navigate the contact again and again, with the aim of getting him discombobulated and trailing the play, allowing one Pacer to pop free and forcing other Knicks to cover him up.
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From there, Indiana's offense can turn into a game of Whac-a-Mole: knock one down, another pops up, and eventually you're taking the ball out of the basket.
'I think it's amplified now, especially against a team like this, where they put you in position to make mistakes,' Hart said at the Knicks' Sunday shootaround before Game 3. 'And if you have one guy that messes up the coverage, one guy that is not communicating, one guy that doesn't step up, it breaks the whole defense down, and now you've got to try to combat that and cover for that. So, a team like this, that's incredibly talented offensively, you can't have any lapses. It just takes one domino to fall to just, you know, [make] everything go chaotic.'
When two dominoes fall, the chaos gets compounded — one of the chief reasons why, for all their offensive talents, the Knicks have struggled more than many anticipated in the minutes shared by Brunson and Towns during their first season together:
Brunson and Towns averaged 25.7 minutes together per game during the regular season. That's gone up to 27.5 throughout the playoffs. In Game 3, though: just 19.
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Thibodeau chalked that up mostly to foul trouble: Towns went to the bench for the final 6:10 of the first half after a successful Indiana challenge reversed a Towns and-one on Haliburton into the All-Star big man's third foul, and Brunson battled whistles for the second time in three games.
'The thing is, you go in with an idea of what you want the rotation to look like, and then the game unfolds,' Thibodeau said during his Monday media availability. 'And then, there's variables that go along with that, whether it be foul trouble or one group gets going, and maybe there's a need for something else. So you always prioritize winning. Put the team first. But the majority of the time, those guys are gonna finish together. They've played a lot of minutes together, and that's the way we approach it.'
Towns struggled mightily when the Pacers hunted him in Game 2, contributing to Thibodeau's decisions both to leave him on the bench for much of the fourth quarter and to shake up his starting five for Game 3, inserting Robinson to insulate Towns and ensure New York maintained paint protection even if Towns got out of position. Towns largely held his own when playing at the 5 in the fourth quarter of Game 3, though, staying poised, executing the coverage and not committing breakdowns that Indiana could exploit.
The time will come, perhaps as soon as Tuesday's Game 4, where Brunson will have to stand his ground, too. He's proven at times to be capable of doing it — chiefly in Round 2 against Boston, battling and holding his own when switched onto bigger wings like Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Expect the Pacers to show a renewed level of intention and aggression in forcing him to prove he can do it against them — especially after feeling like they too often let New York off the hook in Game 3.
'No, it was poor,' Carlisle said of Indiana's second-half offensive process during his Monday media availability at the Pacers' practice facility. 'I mean, it has to be a lot better. I'm not going to get into specifics about it, but it was not good.'
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To a man, the Pacers attributed their underwhelming second half — just 42 points on 14-for-38 shooting, 2-for-12 from 3-point range, with as many turnovers as assists (eight) and zero fast-break points in the fourth — to an overall stagnation of their offensive approach. On one hand, more intentionally hunting Brunson could create more of the kinds of breakdowns that open up swing-swing passing sequences to generate open shots and inject some pace and life back into the Indiana attack.
On the other, though, repeatedly mismatch-hunting to attack Brunson in isolation could further sap some of the verve from Indiana's offense — the Pacers are throwing 60 fewer passes per game against New York than they did through the first two rounds — and maybe even add to the overall sluggishness.
'I feel like if we try to matchup-hunt too much, our offense can get stagnant — I think it did a little bit [in Game 3],' Pacers reserve guard T.J. McConnell said Monday. 'We've just got to be who we are, both offensively and defensively, be more solid on both ends, and get out and run. Because the matchup hunting can make us a little stagnant.'
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While the Pacers try to strike the right balance for their offense, the Knicks will try to strike theirs: how much to lean into better defensive personnel at the risk of minimizing Brunson versus how much to trust their offensive leader to stand up and be counted on the other end of the court. New York's point guard knows another massive test is coming; now, he and his teammates just have to be equal to the challenge.
'I mean, it's competition. It's the playoffs,' Brunson said Monday. 'In order to go through and do something special, you have to go through a lot of adversity. You have to go through a lot of questioning, mentally and internally, if we're going to do this. It can make or break teams when you're going through things like that, and I think obviously what we did [in Game 3] definitely helps us.'