‘You just can’t give games away:’ How the Knicks collapsed against the Hawks — and what they need to clean up

NEW YORK — Mike Brown tried to make it as clear as he could: The reason to win Game 2 wasn’t “to protect home court,” or “to avoid losing momentum,” or “to prevent his New York Knicks from stepping on the same rake that Tom Thibodeau’s version did against the Heat in 2023, or against the Pistons and the Pacers last year.” It was a little simpler than that. A little more … Herm Edwards-y.

“It really doesn’t matter, to me, that we’re home or on the road,” Brown said during his pregame press conference on Monday night. “We want to win the freakin’ game because that’s the next game in front of us. And it’s extremely important to try to go attack it that way, and that’s how we’re going to attack it.”

For most of the first three quarters, the Knicks did attack it that way.

New York’s starting five — which had been outscored since February’s trade deadline, and whose relative ineffectiveness has been a point of contention for these Knicks across two years and two head coaches — was controlling the terms of engagement against an Atlanta starting lineup that had been one of the league’s best since coming together after the All-Star break. The Knicks were leaning on the Hawks, with centers Karl-Anthony Towns and Mitchell Robinson (and energizer guard Jordan Clarkson, who just sort of became an offensive rebounding force over the final 25 games of the season) leveraging their size advantage over Atlanta’s shorter bigs to pull in 10 offensive rebounds through three quarters — a whopping 50% offensive rebounding rate that led to 22 second-chance points.

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Josh Hart was contributing his customary energetic all-around work — rebounding, facilitating, pushing the pace — while continuing to play in-your-jersey defense on Hawks All-Star Jalen Johnson, who’d scored a quiet 11 points on eight shots through three quarters. Mikal Bridges, forever wearing the five-first-round-picks millstone around his neck whenever he doesn’t score a lot, was continuing to keep Nickeil Alexander-Walker from finding daylight, limiting the Most Improved Player candidate to just 2-for-10 shooting amid an extended frigid streak to start the series.

The Knicks were shooting 52% from the floor, holding the Hawks to 43% shooting, and scoring 128.2 points per 100 possessions — a rate of offensive efficiency that would’ve led the league during the regular season. When Hart rebounded a missed CJ McCollum pull-up with just over five minutes to go, they had a 93.4% win probability, according to Inpredictable.

So, y’know … what happened?

“We just got to lock in a little bit better,” Brown said after the Knicks squandered a 12-point fourth-quarter lead and home-court advantage — again — in a 107-106 Game 2 loss. “In a playoff game, it’s tough to win against a good team when you shoot 60% from the free-throw line. In a one-possession game, we missed 10 free throws. One-possession game, we had 14 turnovers for 18 points.”

“We just got to play better with the lead,” said Knicks star Jalen Brunson, after a fourth quarter in which the offense he captains scored just 15 points in 22 possessions — a ghastly 68.2 offensive rating — and in which Jonathan Kuminga and CJ McCollum took turns torching him off the dribble for buckets in Atlanta’s rampaging comeback. “That’s twice in the fourth quarter, now, that we’ve done that.”

“I think just help each other out,” said Bridges, who had a chance to wrest the title of hero away from McCollum with a would-be game-winning jumper that rimmed out. “It’s all five of us out there — I think we just got to communicate, help each other and make it difficult for them.”

“They hit shots and we didn’t make shots,” said Towns — who, notably, only took two of them during the final frame, missing both. Asked about his second consecutive quiet finish, the All-Star center said, “Just, you know, the opportunities just didn’t come around to shoot it. But at the end of the day, I trust everyone in this locker room to shoot the ball.”

OK, so: missed free throws and costly turnovers; a lack of attention to detail and process on the offensive end; insufficient communication and connection in defensive coverages; the vicissitudes of a make-or-miss league. Kind of a lot of action items on that clean-it-up punch list for the Knicks.

Any of them stand out as the most frustrating, Josh?

“Nah, just … all of it,” said Hart, who finished with 15 points, 13 rebounds, 6 assists and 1 steal. “This was a game we should have won, and in the playoffs, you can’t give away games.”

Non-Brunson/KAT lineups to blame?

The Hawks deserve their fair share of credit for taking it: for McCollum’s steady hand, quicksilver handle and feathery touch on the floaters and pull-ups that sunk the Knicks; for Kuminga’s physicality on both ends of the floor in a command performance off the Atlanta bench; for Johnson’s ability to weather a frustrating start to the series and come through with three huge buckets in the final six minutes.

But when you fritter away a double-digit lead at the start of the fourth quarter for just the second time in postseason franchise history, and a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter for the second time in 11 months — and everybody and their mother remembers the firsttwo — even a responsible ceding of credit to the victors doesn’t cover the totality of the circumstance. Not by a long shot.

The most reasonable diagnosis: Bad scene, everyone’s fault.

With the Knicks holding a 12-point lead after three quarters, Brown elected to start the fourth quarter with both Brunson and Towns on the bench. It’s something he rarely did throughout the regular season, but started to do more as the season wore on; lineups without either of New York’s two All-Stars played 182 minutes after the All-Star break, outscoring opponents by 25 points.

Those units — often featuring OG Anunoby as the lone starter, with Robinson at the 5 and Clarkson, Deuce McBride and Landry Shamet as the three guards — skew defense-first, without a traditional point guard or primary shot creator. The conceit: Steal a few minutes at the start of the second and fourth quarters, try to get by with stops, transition play and offensive rebounds, and then be able to bring Brunson and Towns back together, affording New York more minutes with both of its stars on the floor — minutes the Knicks have won comfortably this season, with an elite offense — in which to continue emphasizing their resurgent two-man game. 

“We’ve played that lineup quite a bit since the end of the season, and that lineup’s been pretty good,” Brown said.

Those no-Brunson/KAT lineups held up mostly fine for nine minutes in Game 1. They struggled to start the second quarter of Game 2, generating just one basket and three live-ball turnovers in four minutes in a 13-3 run that gave Atlanta the lead. After a timeout, Brown shuffled things up, sending in Jose Alvarado — a DNP-CD in Game 1 — to settle things down. (Which, y’know, isn’t typically Jose’s modus operandi.) A minute and a half later, the Knicks’ lead was back up to five, and the starters were back in.

When Brown went back to the no-Brunson/KAT look to open the fourth, he tried to fortify it, adding an extra starter (Bridges alongside Anunoby) and Alvarado as a ball-handler to go with Robinson and McBride. It again did not go well: Three misses in four shot attempts, a live-ball turnover leading to a runout layup, some defensive miscommunications leading to wide-open dunks, and an 8-2 run that halved the 12-point lead in less than three minutes.

The glass-half-empty take: Those minutes without an offensive hub effectively submarined New York’s rhythm and flow, with turnovers and empty possessions giving a Hawks team that had been struggling in the half-court an opportunity to get out in transition, where they scored nearly 1.5 points per possession in Game 2, according to Cleaning the Glass — a monster number.

“We had a good lead and just gotta keep playing,” Bridges said. “I think us not getting good looks on offense in the beginning [of the fourth] got them a little rhythm.”

Viewed through another lens, though: The Knicks led by five when Brunson and Towns returned in the second quarter, and by nine when they came back with 7:56 remaining in regulation. Could New York have built larger leads with one of its top guns on the floor in those minutes? Maybe. Did it still have the opportunity to slam the door even with those lineups getting outscored by seven points in 11 total minutes? Absolutely.

“I gotta watch the game, but what I do know is that the time when we were off the court wasn’t when we lost,” Towns said. “It was the time when we were on the court at the end, when they found ways to make shots.”

How the Hawks attacked

They found ways to make shots partly by putting Brunson under the microscope, either by going at him in a size mismatch with Kuminga or running guard-guard screening actions with McCollum and Alexander-Walker. Atlanta’s game plan was clear: Force New York’s weakest defensive link to navigate traffic, deal with physicality, and have to stay in front of offensive players capable of beating him in isolation. He wasn’t able to do it.

While the Hawks targeted Brunson on the defensive end, they also worked hard to prevent New York’s stars from carving them up on the other.

“Any time you have two players of that caliber, with Jalen and KAT, you know, you need to have things that you think about and prepare for […] how you match up can really impact coverages. And that’s something that we’re aware of,” Snyder said before Game 2. “I think you have to have different things that you do to those guys. As you know, there’s gonna be an advantage somewhere, and sometimes making them play out of a different situation can be helpful.”

It proved helpful down the stretch of Game 2. The Hawks toggled through defensive coverages on Brunson, cranking up some late pressure to force the ball out of his hands and force other Knicks to beat them. They again shuffled the defensive matchup on Towns, putting Kuminga on him and center Onyeka Okongwu on Hart for some possessions, then going back to playing things straight late in the game.

On some possessions, they trusted McCollum and Okongwu to hold up on switches when Brunson tried to hunt mismatches in the pick-and-roll. On others, they trusted Alexander-Walker to fight over screens, stay connected and force a tough look.

The result: Just four New York points on 1-for-11 shooting in a six-plus-minute span between the time Brunson, Towns and Hart checked back in with a nine-point lead and when Brunson hit a pull-up 3 to tie the game at 103.

“We were a little stagnant,” Brunson said after the game. “Obviously, I can control what I can control. So, poor decision-making on my part, and a couple of possessions, they played great defense and knocked the ball out of my hands.”

Brunson missed five of his eight shots in the fourth quarter of Game 2, and is now just 3-for-11 in the final frame in this series. Plenty of the shots he’s missed are shots that Knicks fans have seen him make hundreds of times. But the Hawks are betting that, if they can just keep making those looks as hard as possible as often as possible, the odds will swing in their favor. So far, they’ve been right.

“Over the course of the game, if you don’t let up and you don’t give into that, you have an opportunity to have more success late, if you just kind of hang in there,” Snyder said.

The Hawks hung in, dug deep and were rewarded for their resilience. The challenge facing the Knicks: go and do likewise. If there’s a silver lining surrounding the grey clouds hanging over Madison Square Garden, it’s this: They literally did this exact thing a year ago.

“Yeah, you know, we’ve been in this situation before,” Hart said. “Obviously, everyone is frustrated with this loss, and we’re going to go into Game 3 with a great attention to detail and a great focus for a full 48. We’ve got high-character guys who respond well.”

“Oh yeah — losing the game doesn’t mean anything,” Anunoby said. “Like … it’s the playoffs. They’re a good team, too. You know, just watch the film, learn from the mistakes and move on to the next.”