Knicks working on reading and reacting to defense and offensive concepts
Knicks guard Jalen Brunson runs the ball up court against the Minnesota Timberwolves in a preseason game at Madison Square Garden on Thursday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
While so much attention has been paid to the offensive system being installed by new Knicks coach Mike Brown, one thing has been missing.
A play call.
With all of the dissection and all of the talk about how Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns will handle the changes, Brown has asked his players to take the concepts — running the floor, touching the paint, spraying the ball out to shooters — and asked them to do nothing different from what they'd do at the courts at Rucker Park or West 4th Street. Play the game the way you know how.
“Everything is new,” Brunson said. “So attention to detail is key for us to try to get better, faster. So all the little things we picked up and we learned, we can’t just skip over that. We got to understand that all those little things can make a big difference. And so for us, that’s the most important thing.
“[I] always revert to with things like that — adapting to new things — as a kid I moved out seven or eight times, so I always was learning to find new teams, new school, new friends. So everything was always new. So adapting since a young age is always something I had to do. So I’m not nervous at all.”
“I think he just wants to implement playing fast because, honestly, especially the first three quarters, until mid-fourth, you don’t really need plays,” Mikal Bridges said. “You kind of just have concepts and you read and react and it makes it tougher for the defense, honestly, because they don’t know what’s happening because offensively, you don’t even know what’s happening because you’re kind of just reading how you’re going to defend it.”
Brunson has seemed more comfortable each game, and there are times when the play of the team looks very much like it did under Tom Thibodeau. There are similar concepts, things you heard the former coach repeat like a mantra — “the game tells you what to do, get in the paint, draw the defense, kick it out.”
“We’ve kind of restricted our guys to doing certain things,” Brown said after the Knicks improved to 3-0 in the preseason with a 100-95 overtime win over Minnesota on Thursday night in their first Madison Square Garden appearance. “Again, we played the entire game out of our read-and-react early offense.
“We don’t have a single play call in yet. We play off of makes and misses. If a team makes, we do this; if a team misses, we do that. We just try to take what the defense gives us. So it’s hard sometimes because sometimes guys see an advantage or whatever and they want to attack it. But I think if you get great pace, great spacing, you touch the paint, you make quick decisions, you make ball reversals — if you get those things and you know how to play, it doesn’t matter what you do, you’re going to eventually get to a point where it’s gonna be hard to defend because the defense doesn’t know what’s coming. Something different is going to come every time.”
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
