Friday night’s matchup between the Knicks and Thunder was as epic as a regular season game can get. New York came into OKC pitting their nine-game winning streak against the Thunder’s 13 straight victories. They left with a bit of humble pie. The West’s best overcame a 12-point halftime deficit with a strong fourth quarter to send NY packing. The Knicks showed their weaknesses in the loss, and have a lot to improve on going forward.<\/p>\n
While New York should feel good about controlling most of the game on the road, their fourth quarter meltdown exposed glaring issues that need to be fixed before April.<\/p>\n
After trading away Immanuel Quickley<\/a>, RJ Barrett<\/a>, Bojan Bogdanovic<\/a>, Julius Randle<\/a>, and Donte DiVincenzo<\/a> away in 2024, the Knicks’ once-prized depth has now become a shortcoming. With Mitchell Robinson<\/a> still sidelined, New York only has one player they trust in big games coming off the pine. So, Deuce McBride<\/a>‘s absence was felt more heavily when they turned to Cameron Payne<\/a> to run the bench units. In eight minutes without Brunson, New York was outscored by seven points and saw their 4th-quarter lead evaporate.<\/p>\n Tom Thibodeau’s bench group has been an issue all year, prompting him to play starters controversially heavy minutes. Robinson’s return will be more than enough to get the Knicks through the regular season, but won’t be enough to help the second unit compete in the playoffs. Furthermore, too many minutes can wear guys down and cause injury, as we saw in last year’s Knicks playoff run.<\/p>\n New York would do well to add a legit scoring option off the bench<\/a> soon to alleviate concerns about starters’ overuse.<\/p>\n Thibodeau’s defense has rebounded from a lackluster start to the season, posting the fourth-best defensive rating over their past 17 games. However, there is one action that has no solution in sight: pick-and-roll defense. Robinson’s return will help their overall defense<\/a>, but NY is going to go down with their starting five. Josh Hart<\/a>, OG Anunoby<\/a>, and Mikal Bridges<\/a> are great defenders, but Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns<\/a> are easily exploitable.<\/p>\n While both players have their strengths defensively, an elite pick-and-roll pairing will tear them to shreds come playoff time. Friday’s fourth quarter was a prime example. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander<\/a> and Isaiah Hartenstein<\/a> repeatedly forced a third defender to help on the action, leading to countless open threes and layups for OKC. This issue will become even more apparent against a team with zero non-shooters like the Celtics.<\/p>\n Again, Robinson will allow NY to run defensive-oriented lineups, but he will likely not be on the floor much in crunch time.<\/p>\n NY just saw their nine-game winning streak end to conclude a 19-5 run that spanned six weeks of basketball. They’re in a great place and are indisputably a top championship contender. That being said, there is still work to do from both a roster and schematic perspective to beat OKC, Boston, and Cleveland.<\/p>\n The Knicks showed their weaknesses in the loss to the Thunder, and now must address them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Friday night’s matchup between the Knicks and Thunder was as epic as a regular season game can get. New York came into OKC pitting their nine-game winning streak against the Thunder’s 13 straight victories. They left with a bit of humble pie. The West’s best overcame a 12-point halftime deficit with a strong fourth quarter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5412,"featured_media":115999,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1608,12,22],"tags":[1417,1382,1489,215],"class_list":["post-115965","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nba","category-basketball","category-knicks","category-thunder","tag-jalen-brunson","tag-nba-trade","tag-shai-gilgeous-alexander","tag-tom-thibodeau"],"modified_by":"Kenny Kluska","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115965","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5412"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115965"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115965\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116000,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115965\/revisions\/116000"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115965"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115965"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/basketball\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115965"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Pick-and-Roll Defense Will Be Exposed In The Playoffs<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Final Takeaways<\/h3>\n
Knicks Should Be Ecstatic At Where They Are, But Need To Improve\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n