2024-10-26 18:00:03
The addition of Karl-Anthony Towns raises the Knicks’ ceiling. What will it take for him to enable them to collectively reach it?
NEW YORK — As relentless as the Knicks’ beatdown was of Indiana Friday night, a 123-98 rout in which New York outscored its guests 70-40 in the middle two quarters, there was a moment when the sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden stopped cheering for the home team.
An appreciation for something the Pacers did? Nah.
“Let’s go, Yankees!”
The chant rose up in the fourth quarter, as word of Giancarlo Stanton’s two-run home run out in temporarily put his team up 2-1 on the Dodgers in Game 1 of the World Series out in Los Angeles.
New Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns was at the foul line as the Yankees chant boomed. “I heard it,” Towns said. “For sure.” Moments later, a replay of the blast played on the videoboards above the court.
And really, that was about it, the Knicks already up by 28 with more than seven minutes left. Which means none of the five takeaways from this game came in the deep-roster scrimmage that closed out the evening:
1. Trade that hurt, er, helped both teams
Both the Knicks and the Minnesota Timberwolves struggled on opening night Tuesday with their newly configured rotations. What linked them on opposite sides of the country – New York getting spanked in Boston, the Wolves losing to the Lakers – was the sizable trade that swapped Towns for Knicks regulars Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo.
Instant analysis wasn’t about to wait for even a second or third look. “Trade that hurt both teams,” so said the snarky.
Then Randle scored 33 points Thursday in a Wolves victory at Sacramento, and the onus shifted solely onto Towns. If the urgency to play well in the Knicks’ home opener wasn’t already enough, now KAT faced an even hotter spotlight.
So he scored seven early points to delight the MSG fans, finishing with 21, along with 15 rebounds and two blocks.
He and his new teammates couldn’t have scripted it better, with three others scoring 20 or more. That 23-point mess against the Celtics got rinsed away by this 25-point turnabout.
“To respond the way we did defensively, especially, is something that’s encouraging,” Towns said. “We just did a better job of making them miss.”
Truth be told, Towns said the preseason game at MSG against Minnesota two weeks ago helped settle his nerves for this one. He’s back to playing center, after shifting to power forward next to Rudy Gobert in the Wolves’ now-scuttled two-bigs strategy.
The 7-footer has taken only four 3-pointers in two games, fewer than the 5.3 he averaged per night last season. But he remains a threat, which opens up things in New York’s five-out formation.
2. Die with the three, live with the three
New York came within one made 3-pointer by Boston of getting stuck in the NBA record book for most allowed in one game. As it was, the Celtics’ 29-of-61 was lethal in the opener.
This time, the Pacers took 30 from the arc and made just three. Three. Credit poor and rushed shot choices, but credit also the Knicks’ diligence in extending their defense and cleaning up that pivotal flaw.
“Continue to work the game,” coach Tom Thibodeau said. “You can always get something out of every situation. Obviously we were disappointed in that game. But we were trying to figure it out too.”
3. Haliburton sputters again
Tyrese Haliburton didn’t want another performance like the one he rolled out there in the Pacers’ first game at Detroit Wednesday. He scored 15 points, shot 1-of-9 from the arc, had just four assists and had to scramble with the rest of his crew from an eight-point deficit through three quarters.
Things got worse Friday. The Pacers’ All-NBA point guard went scoreless in 26 minutes and mercifully was removed by coach Rick Carlisle after three quarters. He missed all eight of his shots, seven from deep.
“I thought Tyrese did a very good job of keeping his emotions in check and continuing to try to play,” Carlisle said. “Look, nights like this are going to happen to the best players in the world. We all have to take our medicine on this.”
Haliburton wasn’t the only Pacer to struggle, just the highest profile. Try this stat on for size: Indiana’s starters got outscored 102-31 by New York’s.
Carlisle bemoaned his team’s lack of edge after the first quarter, its absence of ball movement and shoddy work on the boards. He kept calling timeouts in those middle quarters, to no avail.
“Bad things at one end fed into bad things at the other,” he said.
Tyrese Haliburton was held scoreless Friday night and fell to 1-for-16 for the season from 3-point range.
4. Bridges shoots his way back
Another new member of the Knicks, Mikal Bridges, shot poorly in the preseason and had some critics suggesting his offseason shooting work installed an unhelpful hitch in his form. But the slender two-way wing was in flow against the Pacers, hitting 8-of-12 overall and two of his three from the arc.
He got himself going with a variety of mid-range shots, turnarounds and runners, always a good way to shake a slump.
He also never got questioned by the one critic whose opinion matters: Thibodeau.
“When you watch him work, you know what he puts into it,” the Knicks coach said afterward. “And then, his body of work. No one’s going to shoot great for 82 games. In the preseason he was trying to work through things, and trying to figure out a new system, new teammates. If you look at it logically, this guy has shot almost 38% [on 3-pointers] his whole career.”
Said Towns: “I never thought he wasn’t in his bag. It was preseason. I could have sworn in the game in Boston he was 0-for-0. He did his job when the lights turned on in finding his shot, his rhythm.”
5. A quick turnaround for Indiana
Tough NBA schedules aren’t what they used to be – four games in five nights are rare, three nights in a row has been gone for decades. But the Pacers are facing a tighter turnaround before their home opener Sunday afternoon against winless Philadelphia.
Indiana is on the road for six of its first 11, jerking in and out of Indy. They travel Sunday evening to Orlando for a game Monday, then bust it home to fade Boston Wednesday. A weekend trip to New Orleans and Dallas is followed by another Magic game, and the Knicks a few days later.
The Pacers host Miami for two straight in mid-November, then bounce to Toronto, Houston and Milwaukee for three.
“This is a gauntlet schedule that we start with,” Carlisle said. “The game in Detroit was a bitch. This game obviously speaks for itself. Philly … they’re coming in desperate. We have to come in desperate too. We have to fight and claw for everything at this point in the season.
“These first 10 or 12 games are as tough as anybody’s in the league.”
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Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.
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