NEW YORK — Through four games of their opening-round series with the New York Knicks, the Atlanta Hawks had succeeded in making life difficult for Jalen Brunson. A team-wide effort helmed by on-ball menaces Dyson Daniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker had helped limit the All-NBA point guard to just 43% shooting inside the 3-point arc, with 14 turnovers mitigating his 21 assists.
The struggle to pop Brunson loose led the Knicks to reorient their offense in Game 4, running possessions through Karl-Anthony Towns and prominently featuring OG Anunoby — an approach that worked, but one necessitated by Atlanta selling out on Brunson.
“He can beat you so many ways,” Hawks head coach Quin Snyder said before Game 5. “You know, we’ll keep putting different guys on him, changing matchups, trying to do anything you can to just make it hard on him […] It’s not easy.”
On Tuesday, Brunson offered a reminder of exactly why that is.
Snyder opened Game 5 by juggling Atlanta’s defensive assignments, cross-matching Daniels onto Towns to try to interrupt the flow he found as a high-post hub in Game 4. That slid Alexander-Walker over to Brunson, and while the newly minted Most Improved Player did his level best — and while Daniels still saw his fair share of time in the matchup — Brunson proceeded to shake loose and put together his most composed, decisive, explosive and overwhelming performance of the series.
“Played well. Made shots,” Alexander-Walker said of Brunson’s play on Tuesday. “Gotta be better in his pick-and-roll coverage. Had a few lanes where he was able to get in the paint, get a half a step. Guys like him, that’s all that they need.”
The Hawks gave Brunson a half-step, and he took a mile, scoring a game-high 39 points on 15-for-23 shooting with 8 assists and just 1 turnover in 35 minutes of work — “a big game from a big-time player,” as Knicks head coach Mike Brown described it after the game — in an emphatic 126-97 win, a near-wire-to-wire victory in which the Hawks’ last lead came when a Daniels tip-in made it … 4-2, with 10:39 to go in the first quarter.
The Knicks exhibited near-total control over the terms of engagement and pace of play in Game 5, flexing their collective muscle and ability to dictate possessions on both ends of the floor and leading by double digits for the entire final three quarters. Whenever the Hawks found a brief flicker of a spark — forcing some stagnant Knick possessions, generating some good looks out of Daniels setting ball screens for CJ McCollum (a whisper-quiet six points on 3-for-10 shooting) or Jalen Johnson (18 points, 10 rebounds, 6 assists) — New York promptly produced a bucket of water to douse it, pushing the lead back up to 20, and eventually as high as 32 before the last gasps of garbage time.
It all stemmed from and culminated in Brunson’s brilliance — particularly in the fourth quarter, where he scored or assisted on nearly as many points (24) as the Hawks scored as a team (25) — which felt like the dam breaking for an Atlanta team that has had to twist, contort and stretch its coverages to try to keep New York’s offense under wraps in this series.
“With this team, I think they’re so good offensively that you have to be prepared, even within a certain game, to adjust to the game,” Snyder said before Game 5. “Because something you do, you may feel good about in the second quarter, and by the end of the third, it’s not working. They can make anything look like it’s not working.”
A steady diet of the Brunson-Towns pick-and-roll in Game 1 led Snyder to explore cross-matching in Game 2. That produced fewer two-man interactions for the Knicks’ best players, and some tougher looks for Brunson, but opened up more opportunities for Anunoby, Towns and Josh Hart on the interior; the Knicks were scoring more than 128 points per 100 possessions through three quarters of Game 2 before collapsing down the stretch. The Hawks fought hard to run New York off the line in Game 3, before the Knicks found a late spark subbing Deuce McBride in for Mikal Bridges with the rest of the starters — a lineup that nearly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
Shifting playmaking responsibility to Towns for much of the last two games, though, feels like the trump card for which Atlanta has yet to find an answer. After repeatedly carving the Hawks up by having Brunson set a flex-screen for Anunoby in the corner while Towns triggered up top in Game 4, New York went back to that action time and again in Game 5, popping Brunson (and Jose Alvarado, when he subbed into the action) loose for several baskets and resulting in Anunoby drawing multiple fouls, as the Hawks continue to struggle with his physicality.
After bending their entire defense to contain him, the Hawks are now dealing with the version of Jalen Brunson they couldn’t afford to see.
(Sarah Stier via Getty Images)
Getting Brunson off the ball earlier in the game and in possessions makes it tougher for the Hawks to lock in on him. Getting Towns a high volume of touches early, especially against smaller or slower defenders that he can beat to the paint to finish, gets him engaged and forces Atlanta to send extra attention his way. Send too much help, and suddenly the Knicks are unlocking their ball movement, pinging the ball around the perimeter and reversing it to the second side, where a shooter like Anunoby, Bridges (still struggling, but active on both ends in Game 5) or McBride, or a slashing driver like Hart or Jordan Clarkson is waiting to take advantage of all the air in Atlanta’s coverage by slicing to the rim.
And when the ball touches the paint and goes up, New York’s got the bigger, burlier, stronger personnel inside to command the high-value real estate in front of the rim. The Knicks outscored Atlanta in the paint 60-42 in Game 5, turned eight offensive rebounds into 20 second-chance points, and outrebounded the Hawks 48-27, with Towns (16 points, 14 rebounds, six assists) and Anunoby (17 points, 10 rebounds) both producing double-doubles in the win.
“I just think that their mindset was to come out and try to bully us and be physical, and they did that,” said Daniels, who finished with 17 points on 7-for-11 shooting — with a number of those baskets coming on “dare you” shots that the Knicks defense conceded in favor of gumming up the Hawks’ works elsewhere — and five assists in the loss. “They pushed us under on rebounds. They set really good screens. They did all the little things.”
The Knicks did the big things, too — the things that take away an underdog’s oxygen.
The Hawks averaged 18.1 fast-break points per game during the regular season, third-most in the NBA, and got out in transition on nearly 17% of their offensive possessions, fourth-most in the league. In Game 4, the Knicks allowed just seven fast-break points. In Game 5, that dropped down to four. In Game 4, Atlanta ran on 12.8% of its offensive trips, according to Cleaning the Glass; in Game 5, that dropped down to a minuscule 8.7%.
It’s not just the uptempo game, though. Throughout their regular-season surge following the Trae Young trade, the Hawks found success by getting into their sets early, moving the ball and moving their bodies — forcing defenses to cover multiple actions across the full breadth of the court, and trusting that if they could make opponents have to navigate enough complexity at high-enough speeds, they’d be able to create breakdowns, advantages and open shots. The Knicks, though, are just smothering that speed.
It’s taking the Hawks a half-second longer to get a shot up, on average, than it did during the regular season. They’re throwing about 44 fewer passes per game and about eight fewer assists than they did during the regular season. They’re covering about a half-mile less on offense than they did during the regular season, and doing it slower than they did during the regular season.
“We were never — their defense never really let us establish consistently how we need to play to beat them,” Snyder said after a game in which Atlanta shot just 44.6% from the field, 31% from 3-point range and 58.8% from the charity stripe. “We have to be more committed to — it’s really, like, imposing your will, you know, on the offensive end. Really moving and passing. You can feel possessions where that occurs, and that’s when we’re efficient, or have success […] I think we need to execute who we are and what we’ve done to be a good team. That’s hard when you play against a team of their caliber, but that level for us, we didn’t hit it. They had a lot to do with that.
“But that can’t be where it stops. We’ve got to be more committed to that, and to playing the way that we know we need to play to be successful. And we get a chance to go home and do that.”
It’s the last chance for these Hawks, who now face a 3-2 deficit in a series they once led 2-1, and head back to State Farm Arena on the brink of elimination. The Hawks will play to save their season on Thursday. To have any hope of doing so, they’re going to have to be a hell of a lot better than they were in either of the last two contests, in which the talent, physicality, shot-making and depth advantages that New York looked to have heading into this 3-vs.-6 matchup have become readily apparent.
“I think for us, we understand what the situation is,” Towns said. “The toughest game to win is the one that ends someone’s season. You have to be super disciplined. We have to execute at the highest level that we have been in this series. We have to get ready for a really tough game.”
So, too, do the Hawks. Because while you might keep Brunson under wraps for a few games in a series, he tends to wriggle free eventually … and once he does, he tends to be awfully tough to get back under wraps again.
“I mean, they’re a good-ass team — they’re going to make it tough on him in a lot of different ways,” McBride said. “But he’s a talented player. It’s not the first time he’s dealt with tough guys to guard. He’s always going to figure it out. That’s one thing I know.”
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