Knicks vs. Pacers: Can Jalen Brunson stand his ground against Indiana's hunting with the season on the line?

Yahoo

2 days 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 tended 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: They didn't have one of their worst 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.
'When teams hunt me … I mean, it is what it is,' Brunson said during New York's Monday media availability, between Games 3 and 4. '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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Through four games of these Eastern Conference finals, though, the effort and execution that Brunson — and the teammates responsible for the gap help and back-side rotations behind him — has mustered on the defensive end has been nowhere near good enough.
A Pacers offense led by Tyrese Haliburton and Pascal Siakam — an attack predicated on speed, spacing, ball and body movement, and forcing opponents to make decisions and, eventually, mistakes — has absolutely carved up the Knicks' defense en route to a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven set. When the series resumes at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, Indiana will be playing for its first NBA Finals appearance in 25 years. New York will be playing to stay alive just one more day.
'Haliburton is a great player, and you don't guard great players in this league individually,' New York head coach Tom Thibodeau said after the 130-121 Pacers win in Game 4 that pressed the Knicks' backs firmly against the wall. 'It's your entire team. If one guy is not doing their job, everyone is going to look bad. There's a combination of things, whether we're talking transition, isolation game, pick-and-roll game, whatever it might be — it's everyone being tied together and moving in unison and reading the ball correctly.'
(Grant Thomas/Yahoo Sports Illustration)
That's right, and there are plenty of factors contributing to New York's coverages frequently looking scrambled and disheveled. Mikal Bridges, whose on-ball defensive playmaking won two games against the Celtics, has hardly seemed to make an impact on Haliburton, who's averaging a breezy 24.3 points and 11 assists in the conference finals. The versatile Siakam has performed well against former teammate OG Anunoby and largely pummeled every other Knick defender he's drawn on a switch or cross-match; that includes Josh Hart, who, for all his energy and effervescence, has been victimized multiple times off the ball by an Indiana attack adept at back-cutting sleeping defenders.
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Karl-Anthony Towns' difficulties with holding up on switches and executing coverages helped lead Thibodeau to insert fellow 7-footer Mitchell Robinson into the starting lineup. After brief bouts of struggle against it early on, Indiana has grown comfortable attacking it; Towns and Robinson are now minus-4 in 40 minutes in the series, with New York scoring and defending at bottom-five levels in their shared floor time.
So, OK, yes: bad scene, everyone's fault. The most common cause of breakdowns for the Knicks, though — and it's one we saw repeatedly throughout Game 4 — has been the Pacers working to put Brunson into the action. To force him to defend, and to force the rest of the Knicks to fly around behind him, rotating to cover up openings and put out fires.
It's really, really hard to do that.
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.
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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, after the Pacers' dominant offensive performance in Game 4? An eye-popping 30.7 points-per-100, as Carlisle and Haliburton have repeatedly sought Brunson out to emphasize his defensive weaknesses in hopes of mitigating his overwhelming offensive strengths:
Through four games, the Pacers' primary perimeter players — Haliburton, Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith — have combined to score 49 points on 18-for-29 shooting (62.1%) when guarded by Brunson, according to NBA Advanced Stats' matchup data, with eight free-throw attempts, 10 assists and two turnovers. Overall, Indiana is shooting 57.1% when Brunson's the closest defender, and has scored a blistering 129 points-per-100 when he's on the court — a 'greatest offense of all time' level of scoring efficiency.
The Pacers have scored 36 points in 33 possessions on which Brunson guarded the ball-handler in the pick-and-roll, according to Synergy Sports tracking — 1.091 points per possession, a mark that would rank the Knicks 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 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. According to PBP Stats' lineup data, the Knicks have outscored their opponents by 5.7 points per 100 possessions in the playoffs when Brunson plays without Towns, and by 10.8 points-per-100 when Towns plays without Brunson … but have been outscored by 4.6 points-per-100 with their two All-NBA mainstays on the floor together.
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In a potentially related story: Brunson and Towns averaged 25.7 minutes together per game during the regular season. That's gone up to 27.4 throughout the playoffs. In Games 3 and 4, though: 22.3.
The Knicks' lone win in the series, in Game 3, came when Thibodeau not only shuffled his starting five, but also reached deep into his bench, finding guards Landry Shamet (who'd played a total of 31 minutes in this postseason prior to Game 3) 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.
'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.'
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When winning means getting stops, though — and against this phenomenal Pacers attack, it does — that's proven much harder to do with both Brunson and Towns on the floor, playing the coverages that have been dialed up.
'The majority of the time, those guys are gonna finish together,' Thibodeau said. 'They've played a lot of minutes together, and that's the way we approach it.'
Which brings us to the existential question that this series has posed, and that the Knicks now find themselves facing, both for Game 5 and beyond: Can that approach allow them to field a championship-level defense? Or are we learning that the foundation of what New York has spent all season — not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars and a half-decade's worth of draft picks — working to build is fundamentally flawed?
Maybe it's too early for all that. Maybe this is a case of missing the forest for the trees — of looking at a 51-win conference finalist and seeing only what's wrong with it, of prematurely determining that a team that was put together on the eve of training camp has reached its conclusion after just one season together, with all of its core pieces under contract and a multi-year window just opening. Maybe, whenever this series ends, cooler heads will prevail and take a lesson from a Pacers team that's had New York's number for two straight springs: that in a league where rosters are built up and torn down in the blink of an eye, continuity and shared experience can become a force multiplier.
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The key to cooler heads prevailing, though, is likely making sure that 'whenever this series ends' isn't Thursday. And for that to happen, Brunson's probably going to have to more effectively stand his ground against Indiana's hunting. 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. Another massive test is coming. The Knicks' season could depend on whether Brunson is ready to meet it.
'Not good enough,' Brunson said after Game 4 when asked to assess how he's handled Indiana's pick-and-roll targeting. 'I could sit here and be very detail-oriented with you about certain things, but obviously, not good enough. There has to be a difference on my part when it comes to that.'