crushing 109-108 loss to the Hawks<\/a> on Thursday.<\/p>\nNow, the Knicks are in the endgame. Their livelihood as they know it is on the line. Because James Dolan \u2014 yes, that James Dolan \u2014 is expecting his expensive team to make a run to the NBA Finals. And the NBA Finals look like an afterthought for a team struggling to get out of the first round.<\/p>\n
Judging by the looks on many faces across the locker room after the game, the players know it, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe reality of it is, and I told them this: it\u2019s a seven-game series for a reason. Stuff\u2019s gonna happen. Plenty of teams have been down 1-2. I even think Oklahoma City was down 1-2 last year, and they end up winning the title,\u201d Brown said after the game. \u201cI\u2019m not saying we\u2019re gonna win it and everything like that, but the reality of it is: it\u2019s seven games, and you take it one game at a time. Each day is its own entity.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, it should sting, because we gave ourselves a chance knowing that we didn\u2019t play our best basketball,\u201d said Brown. \u201cSo it should sting, but we need to feel it, get ready to be locked into the next game, which we will.\u201d<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Bridges should be emotional. His Knicks lost by one, and he finished the game with zero points.<\/p>\n
Not just zero points but four inexplicable turnovers, the first coming on the game\u2019s opening possession, where he drove to the rim, opted against taking contact, and instead jumped into the air, did a 180-degree turn and vaulted the ball directly to the Hawks.<\/p>\n
Atlanta outscored the Knicks by 26 in Bridges\u2019 21 minutes on the floor. Brown benched him most of the second half in favor of Miles McBride, who scored 15 points on five made 3s in 31 minutes off the bench.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had more turnovers [today] than I had the first two games combined. Just sloppy overall,\u201d he said with redness in his eyes, holding back tears. \u201cJust a bad turnover day for me. I\u2019ve just got to clean it up. It\u2019s on me.\u201d<\/p>\n
There hasn\u2019t quite been more pressure on a player in orange and blue than Bridges, who may or may not have asked to be traded to the Knicks to play with his Villanova buddies \u2014 but certainly didn\u2019t demand the Knicks trade five first-round picks for him in the process.<\/p>\n
Bridges deserves all the heat for his performance in Game 3. A player who came up clutch on defense time and time again during the playoffs last season found himself glued to the bench on Thursday because of his offensive decision-making. And the Knicks could have used him in a one-point game down the stretch.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, [I wanted to help in crunch time],\u201d he said. \u201cBut I\u2019ve just got to be better so I can be out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maybe Bridges would have scored at least once had the Knicks prioritized getting him in rhythm on the tail end of the regular season. There were no concerted efforts, however, to force feed their star wing in the final two weeks of the 82-game slate. Which is inexcusable, because Bridges \u2014 like Towns \u2014 is in one of the worst scoring seasons of his NBA career. But the Knicks force-fed Towns over the final month-plus of the regular season.<\/p>\n
Bridges was out there getting cardio.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not concerned about him,\u201d Brown said. \u201cMikal is a pro. He\u2019s been there; he\u2019s played hundreds of basketball games, so he\u2019ll be fine, but [benching him] is what the game called for, and it\u2019s what I went with.\u201d<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Brunson\u2019s got his shades on. He doesn\u2019t have any answers, at least not yet. He\u2019s been so good, so often in the clutch for his team. This year has been an anomaly.<\/p>\n
Or a harsh return to the mean.<\/p>\n
Brunson had two opportunities to give the Knicks an advantage in the final minute of regulation on Thursday. On his team\u2019s second-to-last offensive possession, the Knicks\u2019 captain shot an airball. On the final possession, he drove to the rim, where three Hawks collapsed onto him. Stuck under the bucket, he threw a bad pass that got intercepted and lost the Knicks the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe actually got a switch that we [didn\u2019t] think that we\u2019d get in terms of Okongwu on Jalen, and we cleared the side of the floor for him, and that\u2019s what we wanted to do,\u201d he said. \u201cWe wanted to zoom into the top of the floor and clear that right side of the floor for him, because that\u2019s what [Jalen is] comfortable doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last season, Brunson won the NBA\u2019s Clutch Player of the Year award. This year, he didn\u2019t finish as a top-three finalist.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve made a lot of plays going right and clearly didn\u2019t [convert] this time,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of things to go through that \u2014 myself \u2014 I can be better at. Missed opportunity for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
In New York, everything \u2014 from the Knicks\u2019 title odds to their future \u2014 revolves around Brunson, whose individual scoring greatness helped lift the franchise to new heights. He has struggled, however, balancing scoring and playmaking, and the indecision appears to have cost him his crunch-time rhythm, which cost the Knicks Game 3 \u2014 and maybe much more.<\/p>\n
That is a costly development for an undersized player who\u2019s been exposed by CJ McCollum, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and whichever Hawks scoring threat has intentionally sought the mismatch against Brunson this series.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Brown is still trying to find a combination that can beat the Hawks. On Thursday, he came close: The lineup of Hart, Brunson, McBride, Towns and OG Anunoby outscored the Hawks by 24 points in their 14 minutes played in Game 3. The group boasts a net rating of plus-75 throughout the entire series and plus-32 over 14 minutes logged in the regular season.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like we were getting stops. Getting some good shots,\u201d said Hart. \u201cOG had a couple big threes at the end of the shot clock. Deuce shot the ball well. But I feel like we really played off of our defense.\u201d<\/p>\n
This series is enlightening for Brown, Dolan and the Knicks front office responsible for firing Tom Thibodeau and settling on his replacement. Because Quin Snyder was among the coaches the Knicks, unsuccessfully, touched base with regarding their coaching opening during the offseason.<\/p>\n
Snyder is lapping Brown to start the playoffs.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy job is to keep searching, and that\u2019s what we had to do tonight. We found the right combinations. We got a chance to go up three,\u201d Brown said. \u201cCouldn\u2019t ask for anything better than that with a minute left in the game, a chance to go up by three, especially with the way we played.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brown led a huddle late in the fourth quarter that appeared to fall on deaf ears. His lineups have been questionable: He\u2019s confidently played minutes with no Towns or Brunson on the floor (a terrible idea) and has virtually thrown-out the dual big lineups featuring both Towns and Robinson responsible for saving the Knicks season in their Eastern Conference Finals run last year.<\/p>\n
Brown was noncommittal on the idea of changing the starting lineup.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not even thinking about that right now,\u201d he said. \u201cBut in the same breath, we have to look at everything.\u201d<\/p>\n
He\u2019ll have to change something. The Hawks are rolling. If they beat the Knicks in Game 4 on Saturday, they\u2019ll take a commanding 3-1 series lead. Only 4.4 percent of teams in NBA history to fall into such a playoff hole have come back to win the series.<\/p>\n
The Knicks do not look like outliers. Neither does Brown.<\/p>\n
\u201c[We need to show] a lot [more fight]. We\u2019re down 2-1,\u201d Hart said at his locker. \u201cRight now there\u2019s no room to feel sorry for ourselves. We\u2019ve got another one on Saturday at 6:00. So it\u2019s a quick turnaround. We\u2019ve got to make sure we regroup and go out focused for Game 4.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course it hurts when you give yourself a chance to win, last game, this game,\u201d added Towns. \u201cIt hurts more that we put ourselves in position to win, but we just didn\u2019t close the show. I think that\u2019s why everyone is emotional. It\u2019s tough, but we\u2019ve got to keep our head up. It\u2019s okay to be disappointed. That means we care. We\u2019ve got to get the next one.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA \u2014 Mikal Bridges is holding back tears. Josh Hart is dejected at his locker. Karl-Anthony Towns\u2019 face…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":628809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,304782,16118,20455,20449,12845,15566,16309,85],"class_list":["post-628808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-game-3","tag-hawks","tag-jalen-brunson","tag-karl-anthony-towns","tag-knicks","tag-mike-brown","tag-playoffs","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}