Jalen Brunson said it best.
Shortly after his Knicks responded to a sobering 25-point loss to the Thunder with a 34-point drubbing of the Bucks, Brunson offered a little perspective.
“I don’t really want to have a lot of bounce-back days,” Brunson said after Sunday’s 140-106 win at Madison Square Garden. “I just want to be able to continue to get better every single day and continue to be consistent.”
Indeed, the Knicks have been a particularly high-variance team this season.
They are 0-5 against the Cavaliers, Thunder, Celtics and Rockets — the only four teams with better win percentages than them to begin play Monday — compared to 26-9 against everyone else.
They followed their nine-game win streak from Dec. 15 to Jan. 1 with losses in four of their next five games, including three consecutively.
Going into Monday night’s home game against the Pistons, the Knicks were 4-4 in their last eight games, with all but one of those scores decided by double digits.
“The season, you’re gonna go through a lot of different things, and you have to be able to navigate through everything,” Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau said during Monday’s pregame press conference.
“You want your focus to be on daily improvement, so if some days you fall short, that next day you have to come back with more determination to get things right. It’s a long season, and the whole idea is to keep working each and every day with the thought in mind that you want to be playing your best at the end of the year.”
That won’t come easily, as the Knicks entered Monday with the league’s hardest remaining schedule in terms of opponent win percentage (.523), according to Tankathon. Their final 42 games included three against the NBA-best Cavaliers and three against the defending champion Celtics.
Here are areas where the Knicks can improve:
Reliance on Starters
No team leans more heavily on its starters than the Knicks.
Not even close.
The lineup of Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby and Karl-Anthony Towns had played a whopping 666 minutes together entering Monday’s game.
No other five-player lineup across the entire NBA had played more than 430 minutes together — and only two five-player lineups had played together for even half of the minutes the Knicks’ starters had.
What’s more?
Brunson, Hart, Bridges and Anunoby had played 823 minutes together — again, the most among all four-player lineups in the NBA.
In fact, all five of the NBA’s top four-player lineups in terms of minutes played all belonged to the Knicks, with each featuring a different combination of their starters.
As the most-played three-man lineups? The top seven belonged to the Knicks! Brunson, Bridges and Anunoby had played an incredible 1,042 minutes together to lead the NBA.
No other team had used three players for more than 830 minutes together.
The Knicks entered Monday getting an average of 96.9 points per game from their starters, which led the NBA. That was the driving force in their 26-14 start to the season.
But it also risks burnout.
During their recent slump, the Knicks were outscored 37-19 in the fourth quarter of a loss in Oklahoma City, and 38-17 in the third quarter of a loss in Chicago the following night.
Even in Sunday’s victory, the Knicks used Bridges for 37 minutes, Towns for 36 and Hart for 35 — and that was a game they won by more than 30 points.
Bench Production
This point goes hand in hand with the prior one. The Knicks’ reliance on their starters stems largely from a lack of bench depth.
That depth took a hit with the Knick’s late-offseason trade that sent Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo to Minnesota for Towns. Acquiring Towns — the NBA’s Player of the Month for December — has been a resounding success so far, but because it happened so close to the start of the season, the Knicks did not have much time to replenish their bench.
The continued absence of center Mitchell Robinson, who is rehabbing from May ankle surgery, has also hurt. Thibodeau said Monday that Robinson remains on track to be cleared to practice this month, and that sprinting would be his “next step.”
Precious Achiuwa, Landry Shamet and Miles “Deuce” McBride have also missed stretches with injuries, but even with all three healthy now, the bench production remains down.
Entering Monday, the Knicks ranked dead last in the NBA in bench scoring (20.4) and rebounding (9.9) while getting the fewest minutes from their reserves.
Cameron Payne’s 18 points off the bench — including 13 in the second quarter — helped the Knicks pull away in Sunday’s win.
But that wasn’t enough for the Knicks to snap a streak of 21 consecutive games in which their bench was outscored — a stretch dating back to Dec. 1.
Regain Shooting Numbers
Perhaps the most glaring culprit in the Knicks’ recent slide were their brutal shooting numbers.
During that stretch of four losses in five games, the Knicks shot below 30% from 3-point range in each of the defeats — including 12.9% (4-for-31) in Friday’s 126-101 loss to the Thunder at the Garden.
Anunoby began Monday shooting under 32% from 3-point range since the start of December and was just 1-of-10 in his previous two games.
The Knicks went into the game against the Pistons ranked seventh in the NBA in 3-point percentage (37.5%) and third in field-goal percentage (49.5%) for the season.
“We haven’t shot it well over the last five, but over the course of the season, we’ve shot it extremely well,” Thibodeau said. “Sometimes you can jump to conclusions. As most analytical people would say, it’s too small of a sample size.”