It’s hard to be a good team without being a good clutch team. Of the 12 teams currently in a playoff spot (plus Philly, who’s on the cusp of it), 10 of them are in the top 11 in clutch net rating (the other team is Milwaukee, somehow). The others are Minnesota (15th), Denver (20th), and Houston (24th). Good teams are good because they can grit their teeth and come out on top in clutch scenarios.
The Knicks are among the best of the best in the clutch. Even after Sunday night’s meltdown against OKC,
the Knicks are 19-13 with a plus-17.3 clutch net rating, only behind the Lakers, Thunder, and Sixers. Their defense is third-best, their offense is fourth-best, and their turnover rate is fourth-lowest. It’s overall pretty good.
But it’s not perfect. Now, perfection is an impossibility, but you should always strive to get as close to perfect as humanly possible. The limitations of the Knicks in crunchtime were shown on Sunday, albeit against maybe the most unstoppable force in the NBA in a fully healthy Thunder squad.
The Knicks’ clutch offense revolves around Jalen Brunson, as it should. As you may expect, he’s taken by far the most shots (73), has the most minutes (109), and the most points (99) in clutch scenarios this season among Knicks. No other Knick has even attempted 30 shots. He’s also been efficient, registering 46.6/42.3/76.9 splits. The reigning Clutch Player of the Year is absolutely the right man to assume this responsibility.
But there will be games that teams will sell out to shut his water off. That’s when you usually see guys like OG Anunoby and Landry Shamet get funneled the ball in the corner (Anunoby is 13-26 and 6-12 from 3 in the clutch this season, but what happens when they get the ball out of Brunson’s hands before he can make that read?
Brunson’s 19 assists are also by far the most in the clutch, with Josh Hart second with 8. Speaking of Hart, he’s the black sheep of the starters in crunchtime, only being a plus-2 in 50 minutes, while seven players currently sit at plus-15 or higher. There’s not much ball movement, but that makes sense considering that it’s almost always a Brunson-focused isolation down the stretch. The captain has an exceptionally high 37.2 usage rate in clutch scenarios.
There’s one thing in particular that the Knicks probably should’ve been working on all season, but could still stand to try out to diversify the late offense, and that’s getting Karl-Anthony Towns involved. He’s only attempted 23 shots in clutch scenarios this season and has a paltry 18.8 usage rate. He’s usually reduced to the occasional pick-and-pop and being forced to get his touches on the glass. There are games like last night in OKC where Towns got going with post-ups on smaller defenders and then it just… stopped.
The first, second, and third options should always be Brunson making decisions with the ball in his hands, but Towns is an All-NBA talent in his own right. You didn’t just get him for the other 43 minutes of the game, we saw what he can do when he saved the season by himself in Detroit last April.
But that’s only one thing that could be improved upon in these scenarios. There are two areas where the Knicks are normally quite good, but are mediocre-to-bad in the clutch. The first sorta makes sense, OREB%. Mitchell Robinson has played just 23 total clutch minutes this year for a variety of reasons, and he’s the biggest reason why the Knicks are as monstrous on the boards as they usually are. I’d imagine that more minutes for Big Mitch would increase that rate, and we’ll see it at times in the playoffs, but it’s certainly interesting.
The one that’s more baffling is free-throw percentage. The Knicks, who currently rank 12th in FT% at 79.1% (if you include Mitch, it’s 81.6%), are catastrophically bad in the clutch, ranking 28th at 70.5%. As I said earlier, Mitch barely plays in the clutch and has only attempted four of the team’s 88 clutch free throws. While OG Anunoby and Deuce McBride are shooting fine, others are shooting much worse than their season averages:
Landry Shamet: 6-for-12 (season: 72.6%)
Karl-Anthony Towns: 9-for-14 (season: 85.8%)
Jalen Brunson: 20-for-26 (76.9%, season: 84.3%)
There are many reasons why the Knicks lost Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals to the Pacers, but the biggest one might have been an inability to cash in at the line in the final minute. It’s just not tenable to leave points on the line in games that matter. You might get away with it in Brooklyn, but you won’t in Boston.
