INDIANAPOLIS – The Pacers are the 298th team in NBA history to take a 3-1 series lead. Only 13 teams (4.3 percent) have eventually lost the series.
If the Knicks don’t beat the odds by beating the Pacers in the next three games, the post-mortem analysis won’t be pretty.
The organization will have to ask itself several important questions.
Two of the most pressing questions are obvious ones:
Is Tom Thibodeau the right head coach for the team?
Is the roster good enough to compete for a title?
If the Knicks fall to Indiana, it will be the second straight year where the Pacers put up a roadblock on New York’s path to the NBA Finals.
Are the Pacers simply a better team than the Knicks? Why is that? Style of play? Coaching? Depth?
These are questions the Knicks will need to wrestle with if they lose one of the next three games.
In Game 4, they looked like a disjointed, overmatched group.
The transition defense broke down too often. They were sloppy (17 turnovers) and played into the Pacers’ high-speed offense. Indiana had 20 points off of those turnovers. The Pacers’ bench outscored the Knicks’ reserves, 36-21.
Thibodeau leaned mostly on his starters and Josh Hart in the second half. It didn’t work well on Tuesday. Hart had five turnovers. The New York starters had 10 combined turnovers. The Mitchell Robinson–Karl-Anthony Towns front line hasn’t given New York enough of an advantage.
Mikal Bridges, Jalen Brunson and the rest of the Knicks’ perimeter defenders struggled against Tyrese Haliburton. The Pacers’ two-time All-Star had a great floor game (32 points, 15 assists, 12 rebounds, zero turnovers).
“I got to do a better job,” Bridges said afterward. “We got to do a better job of controlling [Haliburton in space] and helping each other.”
The starting lineup featuring Robinson and Towns didn’t perform well on Tuesday. The group was outscored by eight points in 9:30. Robinson blamed himself after the game.
“Communication, that was the biggest thing. It started with me,” he said. “I wasn’t talking first, and I’m the anchor of the defense. I’m not talking, nobody is.”
Read the full article here