The Knicks try to lay down more bricks on Thursday night at the Garden, without shooting too many of them, as these Knicks continue to try to build what they hope can be the first championship season for the team in more than half-a-century. They get the Pistons on Thursday night, one of those save-the-date, regular-season moments when the Garden really does feel like a mecca.
The Knicks finished strong before the All-Star Break, even laying that big, fat egg against the Pacers. Now here’s the chance to get a little closer to the Pistons in the East, knowing that even if they can’t win the conference, they can at least finish No. 2 ahead of the Celtics and the Cavaliers, because that will matter mightily at playoff time. And they can send a message to the Pistons, who have made them look bad twice this season already.
So this really is a moment, against one of the best teams in the league. This is the shot to throw a shot at the Pistons. And this is another big chance for Jalen Brunson, the best point guard the Knicks have had since Clyde Frazier, to show he can take this Knicks team all the way, the way Clyde did, even if Clyde had more around him.
It was even a cool moment for Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns at All-Star Weekend, in both the Shooting Stars competition and then when Towns briefly guarding Brunson in one of the All-Star games.
“It’s a blessing to have a teammate with me at All-Star Weekend, someone so greatly talented like Jalen Brunson,” Towns said. “It’s really cool to know that after All-Star we’re gonna be teammates.”
More than ever, the two of them need to be good teammates, and that means for each other, the rest of the way. They are the two best the team has. For the Knicks to be the team they want to be — when it will be the playoffs for real and not just the playoff atmosphere Knicks vs. Pistons will bring to the Garden on Thursday — Brunson and Towns have to be a real team the rest of the way.
We know what Brunson can look like at his best, when he is making the kind of shot that he made at the end of Game 6 against the Pistons last spring; when he dusted Ausar Thompson and made the 3-pointer that finished the Pistons once and for all. We know all the winning the Knicks have done since he got to town; how he has become the most important Knick since Patrick Ewing still had his legs underneath him.
We know that Brunson has changed things for the Knicks on the court as Leon Rose has off it. Now he has to show that he can be even more of a leader on the court than he has been already, the kind that Clyde once was, even when he and Willis Reed were a team within the team that also had Dave DeBusschere and Bill Bradley on it, and eventually a great and unselfish superstar like Earl Monroe.
Brunson, the son of an old Knick (his dad, Rick, who was part of the Shooting Stars with him in Los Angeles weekend) has brought old-Knicks class to this new and contending Knicks team. In so many ways, he has become even more popular a sports star in the city than Aaron Judge, at this time when the Knicks really have become the biggest game in town. But the opportunity is there for him to make himself more than a star, turn himself into a legend of the city. That is how big and important another Knicks championship would be.
It sure would be something for the Mets to win their first World Series since 1986 and for the Jets to finally win another Super Bowl. It will be something if and when the Yankees can make it back to the Canyon of Heroes or for John Harbaugh to bring the Giants back, and even for the Rangers to win their first Stanley Cup since 1994, now starting to feel as distant a point in time as 1940 once did for Rangers fans.
But nothing in New York, not at this time and perhaps not for a very long time, would compare to the Knicks being back on top. It doesn’t mean these Knicks are a favorite to do that. They’re not, at least not yet. But both the stakes and potential rewards are bigger for them than any team in town, because it is this town, and because it is basketball.
Here is something Brunson said to Tom Kludt for a fine piece Kludt has written about him in Vanity Fair:
“We’re very gifted. We’re very talented. But we need the little things that help us be better, the intangibles. We got to that point last year where we had it. We don’t have it right now.”
Brunson can be as much in control of them getting there as anyone, and that includes the new coach, Mike Brown. It was Willis Reed who was captain of the glory-days Knicks. Brunson is the captain of the Knicks now, and effectively has been since he first put on a Knicks uniform. He is the one they come to see at the Garden. He is the center of it all, even at point guard. There isn’t much more he can do to make himself better at this point, certainly not on offense. But he is the one who needs to make them all better, not just talk about intangibles, but become the captain of those, too, the same as Clyde was, even if Willis was captain.
Long way to go, for all of them. But this is his team. Out of all of them, this is his moment.
