CHICAGO — Knicks head coach Mike Brown didn’t sugarcoat it.
After watching his team fall 135–125 to the Bulls on Halloween — their third straight loss and a winless end to their first road trip of the season — Brown unloaded on his players’ lack of defensive effort.
“Our ability to guard the basketball was not good in the first half. We were getting blown by possession after possession after possession and guys were finishing at the rim with no help defense there. And if we did bring help, they sprayed the ball like they play, and we didn’t get the shooters. We didn’t close with a purpose and get to their air space to make them uncomfortable,” Brown said after his team dropped below .500 for the first time this year.
“Our defense tonight was nonexistent and it starts with guarding the basketball. We have to be better guarding the basketball. And it has to be with a sense of physicality because if we don’t, teams are gonna do exactly what Chicago did tonight on the offensive end of the floor.”
The Bulls sliced through New York’s defense from the opening tip. They scored 35 points in the first quarter and 37 in the second — turning a game that looked even on paper into a mismatch on the floor. Six Chicago players finished in double figures, including a career-high 32 points from Josh Giddey and 26 from Nikola Vucevic.
“They got whatever they wanted,” said team captain Jalen Brunson, who led the Knicks with 29 points on 12-of-25 shooting.
Brown pointed to a lack of game-plan discipline as the root cause. The Knicks allowed Bulls reserve Ayo Dosunmu to torch them for 22 points on 8-of-10 shooting — many of them in nearly identical fashion.
“I know there were a lot of things game plan wise that we didn’t adhere to, and I can give you a great example: Ayo is a good player,” Brown said. “But seven of his baskets, probably six of them were going to his right hand. And we don’t want to give up the outside first of all, and secondly we don’t want him to be able to get to his right hand and we did that possession after possession after possession.”
The breakdowns didn’t stop there. The Knicks also surrendered 17 made threes on 37 Bulls attempts — a byproduct, Brown said, of overaggressive and undisciplined closeouts that gave Chicago driving lanes and second-chance looks.
The Bulls shot 17-of-37 from three-point range, continuing a troubling early-season pattern for New York’s defense. Two nights earlier, the Bucks went 14-of-34 (41%) from deep in Milwaukee. Before that, the Heat connected on 13-of-37 (35%) in Miami.
“[The Bulls] touched the paint too much, and they were making shots,” said Karl-Anthony Towns. “We knew how well they were playing coming into the game and we just didn’t do enough to play at that kind of level.”
Brown said the Knicks’ perimeter issues start with poor ball containment and overzealous closeouts that compromise the team’s help rotations — a recipe that keeps producing the same result.
“When we close out to guys, we’ve gotta do the best we can to take away their air space but not over run guys. We over ran about four or five guys in the first half and when that happens, they get to the paint, now the help comes, and that’s when the spray threes come,” Brown said. “So we have to do a better job on the ball knowing who we’re guarding, and then on our close-outs, we’ve gotta do a better job of closing out, taking out the air space and sitting down and guarding.”
For the Knicks, it was a humbling defensive failure — one that Brunson couldn’t explain, only own.
“We just didn’t have any game plan discipline. We didn’t do what was asked of us,” he said. “Coach comes up with a game plan and it’s on us to deliver. We can’t switch the game plan if we’re not doing the game plan hard enough. I don’t know what to say.”
