Jalen Brunson is the most important, and impactful Knick, since Patrick Ewing came to Madison Square Garden from Georgetown. He just is. He is the face of them the way Aaron Judge is the face of the Yankees, and the way Derek Jeter was the face of the Yankees before Judge. We knew the Knicks were getting a good player when they got Brunson from the Mavericks. We just didn’t know they were getting a great player, one in the process — especially at this time of year — of turning himself into somebody whose No. 11 is going to be up in the Garden rafters someday.
He has been a classy presence, on and off the court. He has been accountable. He has been honest. Are you kidding? What Knicks fan will ever forget his reaction after his team lost Game 7 at the Garden to the Pacers last spring, a game in which he broke his hand.
After that one he was asked if he thought the season was a success.
Brunson: “No.”
He was then asked why.
Did we win the championship? Did we get close?”
He finished with this:
“So, no. That’s my mindset. That’s just how it is.”
It was as honest an answer as you could expect from a star athlete after a disappointing ending like that. Even with all the wounded Knicks by the time they got to Game 7 — and before Brunson joined the list — there was still the feeling that he would carry them to the next round and the Garden would help him. Only then the Pacers made every shot they looked at and by the end of that Sunday afternoon the Garden, so loud for so much of last season, had gone quiet and the 19,000 had been replaced by next season.
For sure, the Knicks wouldn’t have gotten that far without Brunson scoring the way he was scoring. And having said that, Brunson found out, in lights, over the last two games against the Pistons that all the scoring in the world from him isn’t going to be enough to finally get the Knicks their shot at the Celtics. Because as much as Brunson gave his team last season the boss, Leon Rose, decided it wasn’t enough to make the Knicks a serious championship contender. It’s why he traded for Karl-Anthony Towns and traded five No. 1 draft choices for Mikal Bridges.
When Rose did all that he imagined a game like Thursday night’s. After Towns especially had been ignored by Brunson in Game 2 and by whatever game plan Tom Thibodeau brought to the gym, we saw the Knicks take homecourt advantage right back by doing something that the Knicks of Clyde and Willis and the rest of them turned into a basketball sacrament, which means sharing the ball. You know where that always started? It started with Clyde, the best and most elegant Knicks point guard of them all, best until Brunson.
By the way? As well as the Knicks played on the road on Thursday, the tone being set when Towns and Bridges and OG Anunoby combined for 45 first-half points, they still couldn’t put the Pistons away in the second half; didn’t put this one in the books, as Howie Rose says, until the Pistons threw one last pass away with .5 seconds left. It kept looking as if the Knicks were going to run away with this thing, and still became a rock fight in the end. So if you are thinking that the Knicks have somehow taken the series back, let’s just all of us wait until we see if the Knicks can show up for Game 4 on Sunday and look like the complete and balanced team we saw in Game 3.
Everybody can see the mood swings the way the Knicks are analyzed and covered. They play five tremendous minutes in the fourth quarter of Game 1 and, just like that, it’s Celtics here they come. All the bad basketball that had been played against teams a lot better than the Pistons was forgotten. But then came Game 2, when Brunson pounded the ball so much that you kept expecting the floor to crack wide open and everybody to go falling into Penn Station.
Could they have still won that one, too, come from behind in the fourth quarter again? We all saw that they nearly did; that if Bridges had hit that one crucial 3-pointer near the end we would all have been having a different postgame conversation about all of it, as Thibodeau suggested. But Bridges missed, Dennis Schroder was the one who made the game-changing shot when it was 94-94, and just like that the series was even.
Then came Thursday night.
And even as close as the game was until the finish, even as the Pistons flatly refused to let the Knicks pull away, you at least saw, for an entire game, the version of this Knicks team that Rose imagined when he made those deals. Are they good enough to beat the Celtics if they can make it back to the Eastern Conference semis? Probably not, unless Jayson Tatum’s wrist continues to be an issue.
But what we all saw in Game 3, and clearly, is that this was never supposed to be last year’s Knicks team. Once, a long time ago, the title of Dave DeBusschere’s championship diary was this: “The Open Man.” Brunson and the rest of them honored that concept the other night in Detroit. And when it was winning time, no Knicks fan watching had any problem whatsoever with Brunson treating himself like that man and scoring enough points down the stretch to keep his team from falling into what would have felt like a deep hole, even only down two games to one.
This is not meant to diminish Brunson’s excellence, and the grace he has shown as he really has become the best and most effective Knicks point guard since Clyde. He isn’t afraid of the moment, and we have seen time and again how much of a clutch player he is. We know he can come through in the big city, something we do not yet know, at least in the postseason, about Towns and Bridges.
What we saw in Game 2 isn’t simply on him. Towns could, simply by his own play, and being guarded by a smaller player in Tobias Harris, could have demanded the ball. Thibodeau could have demanded the exact same thing, even though that might be a hard thing for the coach to do when he’s the one who keeps talking about Brunson and his Superman cape.
The Knicks obviously need Brunson to score 30 to have a chance. They’ll probably need that again on Sunday night. But Karl-Anthony Towns is the scoring wing man that Patrick never had. And has to keep scoring the way he did Thursday night if the Knicks are going to get to where they want to go:
Boston, for Game 1.
JUST AN AMAZIN’ START, JUDGE COULD USE A LITTLE HELP HERE & DODGERS HAVE SOME COMPETITION …
Imagine what the Mets are going to look like when Juan Soto hits.
In case you were wondering, the Mets were 13-12 after 25 games last season.
They were 18-7 after 25 games this season.
Wouldn’t it be something if the Clippers turned out to be the varsity team in Los Angeles?
I’m not nearly as interested in Aaron Rodgers’ immediate future as I thought I’d be.
Incidentally?
If the Steelers do sign Rodgers, and also sign off on him appearing with Pat McAfee every Tuesday, they deserve everything they get.
Which will be a lot.
What happens if the Rangers actually make the playoffs next season — Chris Drury gets a contract for life?
Tom Brady went in the 6th round.
Just saying.
It’s still April, of course, but after Wednesday’s game against the Guardians, Cody Bellinger was hitting .177 for our Yankees, Jazz Chisholm, Jr. was hitting .165, Anthony Volpe was hitting .198 and Austin Wells was at .181.
Kind of a good thing they’ve got that Judge dude on their side, right?
Francisco Lindor continues to be one of the most dynamic all-around players the Mets have ever had, all the way back to 1962.
The Yankees really are going to have to break through one of these years, just because they have now won exactly one World Series in the last quarter-century.
I hate the transfer portal in college sports, I just do.
And it’s starting to reach the point where NIL money over the table is starting to look as sketchy as the money college athletes used to get under the table.
What we saw just over the last week, when Jayson Tatum landed wrong and Jimmy Butler landed wrong, is just how fragile these seasons are, particularly at this time of year.
Donald Arthur Mattingly belongs in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
I just don’t like to go too very long without mentioning that.
Actually sort of wondering what took ESPN so long to send Shannon Sharpe to the penalty box.
Did they think the story was going to get better?
However it ended with the Islanders, there have been few front-office careers in the history of New York/New Jersey sports than Lou Lamoriello’s.
The best thing for golf would be if it’s Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler in the last group on Sunday at the PGA.
The last season of “Bosch: Legacy” was up to the high standards the great Michael Connelly set with the Bosch books.
It appears that the other teams in the NL West are going to go ahead and make the Dodgers play the season.
I saw where George Santos is going to get 87 months in prison for fraud and have to admit I was a bit taken aback.
Fraud in politics is still against the law?
Who knew?
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