For a while on Thursday, the Clutch Player of the Year was having an uncharacteristically difficult fourth quarter. In Game 6 of the New York Knicks‘ first-round series against the Detroit Pistons, Jalen Brunson missed eight of the first nine field goals he attempted in the final frame, and the one make was a result of the Pistons inexplicably botching a defensive-rebounding situation, which allowed him to sneak in for an easy layup.
With one minute left, Brunson isolated against Ausar Thompson, an aburdsly athletic 22-year-old menace who has All-Defensive teams in his future. Thompson shadowed him to the right elbow, where he attempted a one-legged fadeaway. Thompson stripped the ball out of his hands, forcing a shot clock violation.
Brunson was 3 for 13 in the fourth quarter when he missed a midrange jumper over Dennis Schröder on the Knicks’ next offensive possession. Mikal Bridges managed to tip it in, though, which gave Brunson a chance to make all of his misses moot.
With 20.6 seconds left and the score tied, New York inbounded the ball to Brunson. Again, Thompson was all over him. Bridges came up to set a screen at the logo, but “ghosted” it instead of making contact. Brunson drove left, then stopped, dribbled the ball between his legs and shed Thompson completely. He took two dribbles and pulled up for a straightway 3. All net.
The bucket gave him 40 points in the game and 10 in the fourth. After a rough Game 5 at Madison Square Garden, Brunson bounced back in the biggest possible way. Absorbing boos — and a loud, extended chant of “FLOP-PER” — at Little Caesars Arena, Brunson broke Detroit’s collective heart and blew the fans a kiss.
With a stop on the next possession, the Knicks ended the game on an 11-1 run and advanced to the second round with a 4-2 series victory. Now, they get to worry about the Boston Celtics, rather than Thompson and the pesky Pistons.
“Man, I just know him so well and I just think when high-pressure situations happen, that doesn’t faze him,” Bridges told reporters. “I’ve just been around him so long and know he’s even-keeled throughout the whole night, no matter if he’s struggling, no matter if he’s hooping — you can never tell. So all I just thought was hopefully he gets some separation. And once he got separation, then it was curtains. When he shot it and made it, I felt like I made it. I was so geeked up. You would have thought I hit the game-winner.”
Brunson said he shot it “a little earlier than I wanted to,” but, against a defender like Thompson, he had to immediately take advantage of the space he’d managed to create.
“I don’t really go and think all right I’m going to make this move right here,” Brunson said. “It’s just an instinct. He beat me to the spot, he cut me off, I just went back the other way and I found a lot of space and I was able to take a shot. That dude was tough to play against. He’s big-time. And I told him, straight to his face after the series, [that] he made me work, so I got a lot of respect for him.”
New York coach Tom Thibodeau said that the playoffs are about perseverance, toughness, and getting through the emotional highs and lows that are unavoidable. In this respect, Brunson’s “makeup” and “intangibles” are what make him special.
“It’s easy to see like how many points a guy scores or what [a player’s] physical tools are, but when you look at the mental tools, that’s everything,” Thibodeau said. “And then how do you deal with, like, if you miss a shot? He comes back, the next one, he’s going to shoot it great. He may miss that one, but he’ll shoot the next one great.”
Just like they were in last season’s first-round series against the Philadelphia 76ers, the Knicks are fortunate to finish off this series in fewer than seven games. Games 3 through 6 all came down to the final possession, and New York needed a 21-0 run in the fourth quarter to steal the opener.
It is not an accident, though, that the Knicks keep finding ways to pull out close games, or that Brunson has an increasingly long list of game-winners on his resume.
“You gotta tip your hat to Brunson for creating the space, finding his shot there at the end,” Detroit coach J.B. Bickerstaff said. “But he’s hard to guard. And the space that they play with and how he can generate space at his size is remarkable. I thought Ausar did a great job on him. He just did what he does and made one more.”
Brunson saved New York from having to play a Game 7 against the Pistons. In the next round, though, his challenge will be significantly tougher. Against the defending champions, can this team even keep it close enough that his crunch-time poise might matter? The Celtics are a more balanced team than the Knicks, with far better spacing, far more defensive versatility and a ton of firepower.
New York’s offense, in particular, was unimpressive overall against Detroit. That will have to change if they’re going to have a chance against Boston, and that’s not all on Brunson. His heroics can be part of the solution, but, with much less room for error, the Knicks can’t continue looking to him to rescue them.
