The Knicks and a struggling Mikal Bridges face familiar dilemma with their season on the brink

Even leading the Boston Celtics 3-2 in the second round last season, Josh Hart sensed something wasn’t working for the New York Knicks. He was struggling in the matchup against Celtics center Luke Kornet. Bigger picture, New York’s starting lineup, against both Detroit and Boston, was struggling after nearly a full season of uninspiring results. So Hart went to then-coach Tom Thibodeau, offering to come off of the bench. 

Thibodeau initially declined the pitch. The Knicks beat the Jayson Tatum-less Celtics in Game 6. They then proceeded to lose Games 1 and 2 of the Eastern Conference finals at home to the Indiana Pacers by eight combined points despite winning the minutes they played with at least one reserve on the floor by 21. It didn’t matter. Nothing matters when your starters get -29’d in the two most important games of the season. Mitchell Robinson joined the starting five for Game 3, but by then, the damage was done. The Knicks lost the series in six.

That series cost Thibodeau his job. Mike Brown has been far from perfect as his replacement, but he has at least been substantially more experimental in his lineup decisions than Thibodeau — at times thus far in the playoffs, perhaps too much so, as he’s run out several lineups with little or no regular-season usage that have largely flopped against Atlanta. New York’s starters were again underwhelming during the regular season. Their net rating was just barely above neutral with garbage time filtered out, according to DataBallr. It was slightly better in Games 1 and 2 against Atlanta, going +6 in 46 minutes across the home split. But there was one noticeable weak link. Mikal Bridges hasn’t been himself for the past two months.

The potential line-up change

Across his last 20 meaningful games between the regular season and playoffs, Bridges has averaged less than 11 points per game on below 45-32-84 shooting splits. His defensive impact has waxed and waned—his deflections and contested shots per minute dipped noticeably at around this point, according to NBA.com tracking data. His minutes, for a time, fell as well. Bridges notably played fewer than 30 minutes, often meaningfully so, in six consecutive March games. Brown never removed him from the starting five, and his minutes slowly picked back up, but New York’s second straight one-point loss to Atlanta in Game 3 of their first-round series might have been a tipping point.

Bridges started the game. He played 21 minutes. He didn’t score a single point. The Knicks lost his minutes by 26 points. Meanwhile, reserve guard Deuce McBride played 31 minutes. He scored 15 points. In the 14 minutes he shared with New York’s four other starters — Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, OG Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns — the Knicks outscored the Hawks by 24 points. That was the unit they closed the game with, the one that led their second-half comeback. 

Bridges vs. McBride

Game 3 stats vs. Hawks

Brown was asked about the unit after the game. He was non-committal. “I mean, I’m not even thinking about that right now, you know?” Brown said when asked about a starting lineup change. “But, in the same breath, I’ve said it before, like you said: We have to look at everything.” That is, in essence, what the Knicks hired Brown to do. Thibodeau got fired because he wouldn’t look at everything, at least not quickly enough.

The raw plus-minus for that McBride+starters lineup is a bit deceptive. There was some pretty noticeable shooting variance, with OG Anunoby making two extremely difficult, contested 3-pointers down the stretch and McBride making one of his own. Never lean too heavily into small-sample net ratings. But the theory of the lineup makes sense.

Bridges is bigger and more disruptive as a helper than McBride defensively. He’s not nearly as tenacious on the ball. That ball-pressure is important in a matchup in which several Hawks, most notably CJ McCollum, have relentlessly hunted Jalen Brunson with ball-screens. The Knicks attempted to combat that in Game 3, with varying degrees of success, by doubling McCollum off the screen and hoping to scramble Brunson back into his less threatening matchup. 

This makes McBride’s superior physicality and ball-pressure vital. If the Knicks trust him to fight through the screen and get back into the play faster than Bridges, and then hold up better in that on-ball matchup, he’s providing more defensive value once the game slows down and Bridges’ impact as a passing-lane disruptor is lessened.

There’s a roster-balance issue to consider here as well. New York’s bench is very guard heavy. In addition to McBride, Jordan Clarkson, Landry Shamet and Jose Alvarado have all gotten minutes in this series. Mo Diawara, the only real wing in the late-season bench rotation, has not. Start McBride and you can more effectively mix in Bridges’ wing size when it’s needed on bench lineups. Perhaps you can also feature him a bit more offensively, especially if Brown plans to keep going back to those problematic lineups featuring neither Brunson nor Towns. Maybe a few minutes as a primary bench creator helps him find a rhythm.

But strip this thing down to the essentials, and the argument for a lineup change is simpler than any of this. McBride is just playing better. He looked more comfortable in Game 3 than Bridges has at any point in this series or, really, the last couple of months. Why exactly that’s the case, we may never know, but it’s been a complicated and pressure-packed season for Bridges. He’s trying to live up to a trade that involved five first-round picks. Seemingly every game turns into a referendum on the deal that brought him to the team. McBride isn’t playing like someone under that sort of pressure.

He missed half of the season due to injury, but he’s never played better when he was available, particularly as a shooter. McBride made 41.3% of of nine 3-point attempts per 36 minutes. Only four other players did that across at least 300 minutes this season, and it’s a who’s who of the NBA‘s best shooters: Kon Knueppel, Isaiah Joe, Sam Merrill and Ty Jerome. If Bridges is playing tentatively, well, he has reasons to be tentative. McBride is playing confidently because he’s earned that confidence.

This is where things get tricky, because confidence is fickle and players are human beings. Remember, Hart offered to go to the bench last year. “It was never going to be a tough day for me because I had a hand in that decision,” he said at the time. Well, Bridges hasn’t come off of the bench in more than six years. Bring him off the bench now, without his say-so, and you risk hurting his confidence for the rest of the postseason. You need to beat Atlanta to survive. You need to beat Boston to win the East, and the Celtics would likely be coming up next. Bridges was critical to last year’s upset over the Celtics. How would he respond to a drastically altered role right before that series? We can’t say with any certainty.

Why hasn’t McBride started before?

There are real reasons the Knicks haven’t gone to McBride in a bigger role in the past, and even reasons to hesitate now. When Hart was the struggling starter, there were calls for McBride to take his place as a way to give the Knicks true, five-out spacing. The numbers supported a longer look at that lineup. Thibodeau seemed to believe the Brunson-McBride pairing was too small. For most of the season, Brown shared that sentiment. That group played only 188 regular-season possessions this season.

But logic has a way of flying out the window under playoff stress. In the pressure-cooker these high-leverage moments create, coaches tend to show you who they really are. Rockets coach Ime Udoka has always prioritized defense above all else, so we really shouldn’t have been surprised when he only trusted Reed Sheppard to play 11 minutes in Game 2 against the Lakers. Thibodeau has always relied too heavily on his starters, so we shouldn’t have been surprised when he took too long to change them last spring.

But Brown has been open-minded about his lineups all season. He’s been much more willing to cut into Bridges’ playing time, specifically, when he’s having an off-night. And in the biggest game of the season to date, it seems notable that he trusted McBride more than he trusted Bridges. Maybe that was a game flow decision, a reaction to a reserve having a great night. Maybe it was a calculated response to the Hawks. Maybe it was the breaking point after two uneven months.

Regardless, the Knicks now find themselves in nearly the same position they were in a year ago. The specific names may have changed, but the situation is eerily similar: with the season on the line, it’s not fully clear who their best five players are. That debate played a part in costing Thibodeau his job. Now the Knicks are two losses away from an embarrassing first-round elimination, and Brown’s fate may hinge on the same conundrum. McBride made his case in Game 3. Now we wait for Brown’s Game 4 decision.