CJ McCollum didn\u2019t get his wish, but he backtracked a bit.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After suggesting that Jalen Brunson faked an injury<\/a> in order to get him a technical foul during the Knicks\u2019 Game 1 win<\/a> over the Hawks Saturday night at Madison Square Garden, McCollum\u2019s tone has changed.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI watched the game and there was contact,\u201d McCollum told The Post at Hawks shootaround Monday morning ahead of Game 2 at MSG. \u201cBut I have a natural fade in my jump shot. And when you don\u2019t jump when you\u2019re guarding somebody, if you don\u2019t jump, there\u2019s a chance you\u2019re gonna get hit. If he would\u2019ve jumped, he wouldn\u2019t have been hit. But since he\u2019s just kind of standing there, it is what it is. I\u2019m sure he\u2019s not worried about that right now. I\u2019m sure he had a good night of recovery and treatment and looking forward to the game just as we are.\u201d<\/p>\n During the second quarter of Game 1, McCollum received a technical for kicking Brunson in the midsection while taking a jump shot. (He was also called for a travel on the play.) Brunson stayed down on the ground in pain for a few moments while the play was reviewed before getting back to his feet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CJ McCollum didn\u2019t get his wish, but he backtracked a bit.\u00a0 After suggesting that Jalen Brunson faked an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":203868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1262,44055,4777,21,56784,80162,9,11,1104,10,319,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-203867","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-atlanta-hawks","9":"tag-cj-mccollum","10":"tag-jalen-brunson","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-nba-playoffs","13":"tag-nba-playoffs-2026","14":"tag-new-york","15":"tag-new-york-headlines","16":"tag-new-york-knicks","17":"tag-new-york-news","18":"tag-sports","19":"tag-sports-plus"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}