As luck would have it, with late Saturday night’s matchup against the Knicks on the line, the Houston Rockets abandoned their winning formula. They let Jalen Brunson operate in an isolation situation, the kind of opportunity they all but sold-out to take away to build an 18-point lead–only to watch it crumble in a massive Knicks late-game rally fueled by a trademark Captain Clutch performance, a Brunson sequence of game-winning heroics that seemed unlikely given Houston’s successful earlier defensive scheme.
That scheme was simple: Do whatever it takes to get the ball out of the All-Star starter’s hands. The Rockets teased it with 3:55 left in the first quarter with the Knicks up six: Amen Thompson and Clint Capela trapped Brunson on a Mitchell Robinson screen near half court. As Robinson rolled hard to the paint, Brunson fired a pass to the right wing to Jeremy Sochan, a career 30% three-point shooter, who missed the open look. Robinson salvaged the possession with a putback on an offensive rebound.
The Rockets went on to trap–or attempt to trap–Brunson on virtually all scenarios involving screens the remainder of the game. Those possessions drew mixed results, which increased the frequency with which Houston attempted to trap the Knicks’ star. By the second quarter, the Rockets were trapping Brunson every minute. By the third? Twice a minute. And by the fourth quarter, Brunson saw as many as four bodies in a single possession: The two who trapped the initial action plus two more who trapped off the relocation.
The Rockets sent the double team, trapped or blitzed Brunson at least 19 times on Saturday. The Knicks scored on only five of those possessions.
“When you put two on the ball, I feel obviously there’s going to be an advantage on the other side,” said Brunson. “We’ve just got to read. We’ve got to read the game and figure out how to attack it.”
Therein lies one of the issues the Knicks will need to solve, a problem they’ll need to solve when games skew heavily matchup-oriented in the playoffs. Brunson can score at will, but he can’t force it against two defenders, and when the ball leaves his hands, opponents feel comfortable living with the results.
The results for the Rockets changed only when their defensive tactics did, too. Because Brunson Island with the game on the line is the last place a defender wants to be. Jabari Smith Jr. and Tari Eason learned the hard way. Brunson hit Smith with four crossovers into a step-back two to bring the Knicks within two, then invited Eason to perform the Electric Slide before pulling up for the go-ahead two with less than 30 seconds in regulation.
“By then, Jalen was in a groove, and it didn’t matter who was on him. He found a way to score,” said head coach Mike Brown. “And he was big for us, especially in that fourth quarter. So for us, starting the game, even with them playing that way, we were scoring. We were playing fast and we have to continue to play fast.”
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Alperen Sengun had 15 points and 7 assists through the first three quarters. He combined to score and assist on zero points in the final period.
Karl-Anthony Towns did that. His teammates followed suit in easily the best defensive quarter of the season. The Knicks held the Rockets, who scored 70 points over the second and third quarters, to just 15 points on 5-of-18 shooting from the field in the fourth. The Rockets turned the ball over nine times as they watched an 18-point lead devolve into a two-point loss.
“I just challenged our team to start the fourth. I challenged us. I said, ‘We can win this game. I’ve seen us do it, and it starts with the first possession of the fourth quarter playing defense. We’ve gotta get a stop,’” Towns recounted. “It’s the most important possession of the game, the first play of the fourth quarter. I wanted to do my part as well in trying to get that stop.”
Towns played quite possibly his best offensive game of the 2026 calendar year. He scored 25 points on 10-of-15 shooting from the field and made all three of his attempts from behind the arc. He worked to establish deep post position first and made his first three hook shots before attempting his first three in the final minute of the second quarter.
The offense was always eventually going to come around–no matter how steep the fall-off in Year 1 under Mike Brown–for a six-time All-Star known to be one of the better scoring big men in NBA history. It’s safe to say the Knicks weren’t banking on their big man being a voice of reason on the defensive end.
“At the start of the fourth, I drew up a play, I was talking about offense and defense, and KAT said ‘Hey, at the end of the day, it starts defensively. It’s gotta start with getting stops,’ and that first possession defensively, you could see the sense of urgency and physicality that KAT was talking about when he was guarding Sengun on the perimeter.”
“He said, ‘We’ve gotta fight.’ He said all the right things. He got us going,” added Jose Alvarado. “He got everybody going, and we just followed him.”
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Five steals twice in a three-game span sounds like some sort of NBA record–until you realize players like Alvin Robertson, Michael Ray Richardson, John Stockton and Slick Watts have numbers that’ll never be touched in NBA history.
Jose Alvarado’s grand thefts in a Knicks jersey may not go down in league lore, but his impact can’t be overstated enough in the short period he’s been in a Knicks jersey.
The Knicks took a hit when they lost Miles McBride to a pelvic surgery expected to sideline him the remainder of the regular season. They haven’t missed a beat since trading Guerschon Yabusele as part of a three-team deal that netted Alvarado from the New Orleans Pelicans.
Alvarado has helped solve more than one issue for the Knicks, and on Saturday, fans cheered their new addition using the same sound profile international fans use in sports like soccer and professional fighting to cheer the hometown hero.
“Jose! Jose, Jose Jose,” the Garden chanted in unison as he ran amuck against the Rockets on Saturday.
Alvarado heard them loud and clear.
“It’s always gonna be amazing. It’s like a pride thing you get–like when I play for my national team, my country–it’s like that playing for my hometown. I’m always gonna have to represent on another level and just compete,” he said. “Sometimes, it’s not gonna be shots falling. You’ve gotta do the little things and get steals and stuff like that.
“So it’s always gonna be a different type of motor when I put that jersey on me. I’m from here. I’ve gotta represent the best way I can.”
Alvarado has 10 steals over his last three games. In an egregiously small sample size, he has become the Knicks’ all-time franchise leader in steals per game (2.6).
“Jose is a very active defender. He gets his hands on a lot of balls,” said Brown. “He’s extremely quick so his rotations, he might not be in the right spot initially so when you’re driving the basketball, you think somebody’s open and because of his quickness, he’s able to make a beat on that basketball and get a deflection.”
It’s more than just defense. The Knicks outscored the Rockets by 23 points in Towns’ 34 minutes of play on Saturday. They outscored Houston by 19 points in Alvarado’s 20 minutes, which included eight points and four assists, plus closing minutes alongside Landry Shamet with Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart watching crunch time from the bench.
That will be next for Brown and his staff after a near disaster against the Rockets: continued tinkering with rotations to find out which lineups he can trust under duress. Which lineups he can trust when the ball is forced out of Brunson’s hands. Which lineups he can trust when Towns doesn’t have it going, when the three ball isn’t falling or when one of the starters just doesn’t have it, like Hart, who uncharacteristically scored just two points in a high-leverage game against the Rockets.
The Knicks found a way to win. That’s what matters at the end of the day. But learning from their wins is just as important, and the Rockets gave the Knicks a lot to think about on Saturday.
“I like our guys’ stick-to-it-ness because there were times where we could have folded, and we stuck with it,” said Brown. “It was great because we kept searching for combinations until we found one that worked. Rick Brunson suggested throwing Jose in the game which was the right call. We threw Jose in and he gave us a spark on both ends of the floor.”
