The problem with having a season like Jalen Brunson’s is that excellence is expected. Amazing things become commonplace.
Prodigious comes as no surprise.
And what about when you throw in the occasional stinker?
Well, that’s outstanding. It’s like wearing a tie-dye cummerbund with a tuxedo. Puma is like matching her evening dress with her clydes. It’s hard to miss.
Brunson was largely absent from Game 1 of the playoffs against the 76ers on Saturday night.
He missed 18 of 26 shots. He missed five of six 3s. He also missed a technical free throw. But it wasn’t just his shooting that failed. He had five turnovers and had the ball picked clean twice. He had a tough night protecting someone.
“We have to go back to square one and get better,” Brunson said.
But here’s the problem. Branson has a habit of taking his own words literally. On the rare occasions this year when he hasn’t reached MVP level, he usually responds with the kind of ferocious, resilient bounce back that led to his unlikely rise as one of the league’s best players. It helps explain a lot of things.
Back to square one: Brunson had a rough game in the season opener against the Celtics at Madison Square Garden, going 6-of-21 shooting in a 108-104 loss, and was generally manhandled by Boston’s guards. I was disappointed. Two nights later in Atlanta, he hit a career-high eight threes as the Knicks continued their run by defeating the Hawks.
Two nights earlier, the Knicks lost a demoralizing game to the Jazz in Salt Lake City, where Brunson got into a scuffle, missed 13 shots and missed five free throws. But in Phoenix, against a full-fledged Suns team, Brunson helped lead the Knicks to their first win of the season. He scored 50 points (35 in the second half) on 9-of-3 shooting in a 139-122 win. ), added nine assists and five steals.
Kevin Durant later marveled at this. “This is his franchise.
And he’s going to be a Hall of Fame player by the end of his career as he’s playing there. ”
Oh, yes. Branson is nothing without resilience. And less than an hour after Game 1, he was already planning how to go about it for Game 2 at the Garden on Monday night.
“I give them a lot of credit,” Brunson said of the Sixers and the stop-Jalen game plan they executed almost perfectly. “I have to tell myself to get better and speed up and slow down a little bit. I have to give them a lot of credit, but while my teammates made big shots, I They made some key plays, but credit to them and they played well today.”
The Knicks are not, by and large, a team that needs to be informed regularly about how things are done. But it is their duty to work on Monday anyway. The Sixers came here stealing just one point at the Garden and came pretty close on Saturday.
And while it may have been encouraging to see that the Knicks could still win if Brunson showed a C-plus game, Philadelphia saw them take a step forward against the Knicks with Joel Embiid barely able to jump. I had to be encouraged. Cross the line on the court.
The Knicks’ chronic habit of wasting Game 1, a best-of-seven game at home, is well known. Before Saturday, they had lost their previous three championships (last year in Miami, 2021 in Atlanta, 2013 in Indiana) and their Throughout history, it has always – always – brought series down by doing so. .
Oddly enough, only twice in their history have they lost the second game at home after winning the first game, and those two were against Atlanta in the conference semifinals in 1971 and in 1970. It was against Los Angeles in the 2018 NBA Finals. They defeated the Hawks in five games and famously defeated the Lakers in seven games to win the series.
But such history is like a guy at a bar who can rattle off all the coincidences of the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations after a couple of warm-up bourbons. Interesting, but not very relevant or useful information. For the Knicks, this is important. If they arrive in Philadelphia on Thursday with a 2-0 lead in this series, life will be much less complicated for them.
