10 takeaways from a wild Knicks/Pistons Game 6

Damn the basketball gods -- and Jalen Brunson -- for depriving us of Game 7

Whooooo-wee. What a series!

The Knicks end the victor in what was one of the closest first-round battles I can remember. Despite being the 4-2 loser, Detroit was the better team for much of the run. But a combination of playoff inexperience, bad luck, and not employing the Clutch Player of the Year sank them down the stretch time after time.

I desperately wish we had one more game coming, but I’ll have to settle for one of the wildest playoff matches in recent memory. Let’s talk about what happened.

1) We have to start at the end. This isn’t so much a deep-cut takeaway as appreciation. Jalen Brunson’s heroics in fourth quarters this season earned him the CPOY trophy, and he proved why he was a good choice all series long. Last night was another feather in his well-plumed cap.

Brunson shrugged off Ausar Thompson like an unwanted coat with a vicious between-the-legs snatch-back dribble and assassinated the Pistons with a long three to win the series:

Detroit’s Malik Beasley, who had been white-hot, would have had a decent look to tie it after a nice after-time-out play from coach JB Bickerstaff, but he fumbled the ball out of bounds.

(The Beasley/Gary Trent parallels are poetic. Just two nights apart, both players had electric shooting nights in their team’s final game. Unfortunately, both developed butterfingers in the last seconds, letting the ball and the game slip right out of bounds. Watching first Milwaukee and then Detroit lose in almost the exact same way brought me immense second-hand embarrassment.)

Despite that shot, Detroit coach JB Bickerstaff subbing Thompson out for a few minutes near the end of the fourth will go down as a major what-if. Brunson scored five straight points in Thompson’s absence, and Thompson even had an incredible block on Brunson right after subbing back in.

2) The focus on Brunson’s heroics once again relegates Karl-Anthony Towns to the background, but I can’t leave him alone. Both coaches’ strategies around Karl-Anthony Towns perplexed me.

Much has been made about how the Knicks’ offense has lost Towns in the shuffle. Even in this game, there was a stretch where the Towns/Brunson pick-and-roll was working wonders, only for it to become an afterthought for the rest of the game. It’s a credit to the rest of the Knicks that they won despite Towns only scoring 10 points; it’s a discredit to Brunson, Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau, and Towns himself that he only scored 10 points. They’ll need more from him to steal a couple of games from Boston, that’s for sure.

On the other end, Tobias Harris generally did a very good job containing Towns, so why did Bickerstaff feel the need to keep putting Jalen Duren on him in crunch time? Duren is not a good defender, and he’s even worse when he has to guard someone like Towns, who can score from anywhere on the floor. Duren’s best skill is his shotblocking, and he can’t utilize that when he’s at the three-point line.

Duren struggled defensively throughout the series, no matter where he was. For such an athletic guy, he’s constantly off-balance, and too many players have no problems going right through him. Sure, Anunoby ends up turning the ball over, but Duren has little to do with it:

3) Conversely, Cade Cunningham’s defensive transformation has been a wonderful development for Pistons faithful. He’s been racking up chase-down blocks all season, which have been a blast to watch. But he’s also gotten far stouter at the point of attack. Watch him give up zero ground while stonewalling Anunoby for a great example:

Cade is the rare player who has gotten more athletic several years into his career. Much of that is undoubtedly health-related, but he’s so much quicker, jumpier, and stronger now. Combine that with Bickerstaff’s trademark ability to get stars to buy into the defensive side, and Cunningham has become a legitimately solid defender.

Playoff teams are hyper-focused on attacking weaknesses. Ballhandling stars get picked on even more, as teams hope to tire them out on defense so they have less energy on offense (see the Timberwolves going at Luka Doncic for a prime example). Cunningham’s improvement has made that strategy untenable, particularly when he shares the court with juicier targets like Malik Beasley or Tim Hardaway Jr.

4) Dennis Schroder was mostly awesome for Detroit all season, the occasional Brunson blow-by aside. Something he’s done far more of and far more effectively than I can remember in previous stops is lay some brutal picks.

In Game 6, the broadcast team called them “John Stockton screens,” which was a perfect analogy. Stockton was an infamously dirty player who played every mean trick to gain a physical advantage. Some of the Schroder screens are right out of his book. The Knicks even challenged one, and somehow, the referees decided this was fine:

Usually, if a guy hugs a player like a long-lost relative, I’d consider that a foul, but what do I know?

Schroder was setting screens like this all series and nearly always got away with it. Littler players tend to be allowed more leeway when battling bigger guys. Schroder doesn’t so much toe the line as wipe it away with his foot and re-draw it a few inches further away.

5) Speaking of feet, Brunson’s footwork is unbelievable. I dissected Brunson’s shot bag in gross detail last playoffs, so if you want a deeper dive into how he does what he does, that’s a good place to start. But it bears repeating that few players in the league can manipulate defenders with their piggly-wigglies quite like Brunson. When he actually tries to score instead of drawing fouls (and his floppy-fish tendencies were relatively muted last night), it’s a sight to see:

(Brunson always spins over that left shoulder.)

Step-backs, step-throughs, pull-ups… Brunson has mastered every hyphenate out there.

6) For all of Brunson’s scoring heroics (40 points!), this was also one of his best passing games. There will always be a scootch too much dribble-dribble-dribble built into Brunson’s game for my tastes. He will miss guys, either accidentally or on purpose, in favor of looking for yet another leaning floater (a shot he’s incredible at, to be clear). New York’s bare-bones offensive scheme both enables Brunson’s worst tendencies and relies upon his best.

But tonight, Brunson had a series of beautiful dimes, each prettier than the last. This pass was unreal:

In my opinion (although Thibodeau may disagree), the Knicks’ attack is at its best when Brunson is equal parts isolation pounder, off-ball gravity warper, and pick-and-roll playmaker. When he leans too heavily into the first part, the offense can stagnate. While several possessions went 16 seconds long with only one Knick touching the ball, Brunson mostly did a great job of leveraging the defense’s attention to find cutters around the rim.

7) Mikal Bridges had a monster game despite almost never having a play run for him. Bridges made his living on cuts, fast breaks, and crucial putbacks, ending up 10-for-12 from two-point range.

If you were casually watching the game at a bar or on a second screen, you would never have known that he finished with 25 points, many on an absurd degree of difficulty. Bridges had not one, but two tricky alley-oop layups. He even made an ugly jumper in which he appeared to slip while trying to stop.

Without his scavenging, try-hardness, and (let’s be honest) good luck, the Knicks would be having much tougher conversations today.

8) That brings up something else. Every close game involves a couple of fluke bounces that break one way or the other, but it felt like there were an inordinate number of odd plays tonight. From the Bridges plays above to Ausar Thompson nearly botching a fast break dunk that miraculously rolled in to Jalen Duren somehow smacking another jump ball straight out of bounds, there was some memorable weirdness!

Nothing was as unfortunate as the Tobias Harris would-be rebound in the waning minutes, in which he corralled a loose ball only to trip over a prone Duren and fall like a tumbling Jenga tower out of bounds:

But this diabolical rebound off a Brunson miss, which somehow floated over two Detroit players right back to the Knicks guard for an easy putback, might have been the cruelest play:

They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Sometimes, though, luck is just luck, and in this series, Lady Fortune blessed New York more often.

9) Despite that, Detroit had plenty of opportunities to win games in this series, but predictably for a young team in the bright lights of the Big Apple, they fell apart down the stretch far too often. From allowing the Knicks to go on a 21-0, Cam Payne-fueled run in Game 1 to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory to the sloppy and unfortunate turnovers at the end of Game 6, the Pistons never quite figured out how to land a killing blow.

A big part of that was Detroit’s inability to make a three-pointer. In Game 6, Thibodeau deserves credit for implementing a new tactic on Cunningham that he hadn’t explored much in previous games: defenders went under the screen, daring Cunningham to punish them from behind the line.

Cunningham isn’t a knockdown shooter, but he’s usually competent. Last night, he lost his nerve after going 0-for-8 from deep (and he shot just 5-for-28 for the series! That’s not enough volume or accuracy for a primary ballhandler in today’s NBA). He only attempted one triple in the fourth quarter.

It’s hard to score in crunch time when your best player isn’t taking advantage of pick-and-roll defense like this:

Cunningham is 23. This is an excellent learning experience for him; he can use this loss as motivation over the summer. The off-the-dribble three-pointer simply must become a more reliable weapon for Cunningham to ascend to the rank of superstar.

10) The Brunson game-winner was incredible, a fitting capper for an epically fun series. If I were a Knicks fan, I wouldn’t trade that feeling for anything. Sports are about more than just winning championships. They are about memories, about the moment-to-moment brilliance we are blessed to witness. This will be a hell of a memory.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if the Brunson shot is a bad thing for the Knicks’ long-term trajectory. A first-round loss would have sent Thibodeau to the curb, and frankly, I think the Knicks need a better coach to become more than just the sum of their parts.

New York will almost assuredly lose to the Celtics in the next round; if it’s bad enough, perhaps Thibodeau gets canned anyway.

Ugh, I hate myself for thinking about this. Pretend I never wrote this part. Let’s simply bask in the warm afterglow of an extremely enjoyable series.