How Knicks defense became TOP 10 in NBA: Swarming from OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges

How Knicks defense became TOP 10 in NBA: Swarming from OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, Mikal Bridges

I want to start by shouting out the defensive trio of Josh Hart, OG Anobi, and Mikuel Bridges. I’m gonna have some clips of this today. We’re we’re experimenting with some new social media content. I’m going to put together some video examples of this for later today. But those three guys really dominated the defensive end of the floor during that second quarter run. No surprise there. That trio has been fantastic all season. As a matter of fact, the Knicks have a 101 defensive rating with Josh Hart, Male Bridges, and Oianobi on the floor together. And that group is plus 28 net overall to start the season. But it really comes down to one of the most important foundational defensive concepts in the NBA, which is the ability to shrink the floor while still being able to recover out to the perimeter. I think this specific concept is what made the Golden State Warriors such a dominant defense in their peak with Draymond Green and whether it was Andrew Wiggins or it was Harrison Barnes or Kevin Durant or whatever players they had on the floor. They always so good at shrinking the floor, making things feel super compact around the ball, but whenever you throw these kick outs, they’d be bang banging their rotations and things would be gone. Oklahoma City is probably the best team in the league at this specific concept right now. But the Knicks, when they’re at their best defensively, that is what makes them good. All three of those particular guys, Josh Hart, Male Bridges, and OG are very good like athletic dig down and recover guys. They can cover ground when they need to to make things feel compact, but still get out to the perimeter. All three guys did damage in that second quarter run. The box score only showed two blocks for Ojanobi, but it’s because there was this weird one where he definitely blocked Sandro Mamo Kellash Vi on a driving layup, but it got logged as a steal for some reason. I had him for three blocks in the second quarter alone. And two of those were possessions where he helped off of a shooter on the weak side to get to a driver and blow up a play, blocking them at the rim. Male Bridges had a similar kind of peeloff situation where Scotty Barnes is posting up in the middle of the floor. Looks like he’s all alone. As soon as Muel Bridges guarding somebody right at the top of the key. As soon as Scotty turns over his right shoulder to take that little fadeaway, MueL Bridges just digs down quickly, gets over the top and deflects the ball away from Scotty Brown. Uh Scotty Barnes, another block. Again, the rangy athleticism of those guys. Josh Hart was doing damage on his dig downs. He had a a steal on Chucky Heatburn in that run where he just dug down in the lane, swatted down at the basketball, caused him to lose control, and led to a turnover. Now, throughout the quarter, there were several examples where those guys were in the lane, but those kickout passes were made by Toronto and they had to make the rotations to kill those sequences. A perfect example was one with Scotty Barnes along the right wing. He gets Carl Anthony Towns on a switch and he drives down the lane line and as a result OGNobi sends like a late double team. So now you’ve got Cat and Odobi double teaming Scotty Barnes on the right block. This forms a threeon two on the weak side with Josh Hart and Male Bridges. So you have Sandro Melmo Kellos Villi who tees up right in front of the rim. He’s just standing there wide open right in front of the rim. Josh Hart comes off of Grady Dick in the corner to tag him. Right. That leaves a twoon-one on the weak side with Male Bridges kind of splitting the difference between Grady Dick and I think it was Jacobe Walter on the left wing. Right. So there’s an opening on the weak side, but Josh Hart is taking away the easy layup. And to Scotty Barnes’s credit, he makes a beautiful kickout pass uh crosscourt on a rope right into Jacobe Walters hands. The right read in that situation. So in other words, the Raptors did everything right. They got a favorable matchup by getting Carl Anthony Towns onto Scotty Barnes. Scotty Barnes attacked that matchup and drew a double team, created an advantage on the weak side, made the read, rifled a great pass to the wide openen guy on the wing. Here’s the problem. Male Bridges flies out to Jacobe Walter. Josh Hart flies out to Grady Dick in the corner and Mamu Kellos is not open anymore because Cat just quick peels off right onto Mamu. Bam, the advantage is gone. Those are the kinds of sequences that blow up these uh that allow the the the Knicks to essentially load up on the ball but not give up easy openings on the weak side because they have these rangy athletes that can recover back out to the perimeter. And by the way, the Knicks defense is up to 10th in defensive rating now after their performance in Toronto last night. That has been one of the driving forces to the successful stretches of Knicks defense dating even back to last year like the Celtics series. That was a big part of how they won the Celtics series. Male Bridges and OG and Obi and Josh Hart flying around on in helping and recover situations making the onball player feel crowded but then suddenly getting out and forcing contested shots or chasing people off the line so that their defense can recover. Now, I want to come back to the defense and the bigger picture here in just a second. But quickly, just to close out the game reaction, I also thought the Knicks did an amazing job attacking the rim in that second quarter. We talked about this a lot in our video on uh December 1st and I encourage you Knicks fans if you haven’t seen that one yet. That’s where we really broke down some of the specifics of the Knicks offense and how they’re driving the basketball a lot more this year, how they’re generating a lot more spot up opportunities than they did in previous years and and how that’s leading to another level from them offensively than we saw under Tom Tibido. But last night was a perfect example of that in that second quarter as the Knicks were just relentlessly attacking the basket. Cat was attacking the rim that entire run. He had a couple really nice drives including a nasty, nasty poster dunk where he faked a dribble handoff with Male Bridges and got down the lane and just hammered it. Started screaming. He had a deep seal where he actually got blocked on a really nice defensive rotation from Oji Abbaji, but he just recovered, got the ball back and fed it back into the basket. A lot of attacking Grady Dick in one-on-one. Jordan Clarkson beat him one on one-on-one on a drive. OG and Anobi beat him for a short little fadeaway. OG was great in that run. He had he actually led the Knicks in scoring in the second quarter. He drew a couple fouls attacking the rim. Uh just really nice work offensively from the Knicks. Jaylen Brunson who was amazing in the first quarter. Continued that in the uh in the second quarter run. He just has too much size on Jamal Shed who’s easily able to shoot over the top. He was getting to his floater in that second quarter. It was just one of the best quarters of Knicks basketball from this entire season. They outscored the Raptors 34-13 in that second quarter run. It’s basically game over from there. The the Raptors were never able to even come close to threatening them the rest of the way. So, I want to dig into two more ideas here with the Knicks before we move on uh to a little bit of Raptors and then we’ll go to the next game. First of all, how do the Knicks turn this statistically successful defense into a resilient one that doesn’t have the issues like they had in the postseason last year or in the Boston game a few games ago? And to me, it’s about acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses. You have a strength in the athleticism you have around your stars and their ability to stunt and recover or help and recover like we talked about earlier, right? You have a weakness in the form of a physically limited Jaylen Brunson which acts as an entry point for your defense. And then Cat who’s incredibly mistaken. Now, some of Cat’s mistake making is just part of the deal, and there’s nothing you can do to coach that out of the situation or build a lineup to cover for him. Like that last second or late kind of crunchtime close out on Jordan Walsh in the left corner of the Celtics game where he just guy who’s three for nine on quarter threes in the entire season and Cat’s like jumping out of his shoes to chase him off the line and Jordan Walsh just driving for a layup. Like that’s there’s nothing Mike Brown can do about that. That’s just an incredibly stupid mistake, right? Or the stuff that was happening at the tail end of the Pacers series where Cat is like in transition defense position at the top of the key and he’s like crashing off the top and they’re just giving out run they’re giving up runouts to Pascal Seakum the other way because Cat’s not paying attention to like a foundational concept of transition defense which is when you’re at the top of the key. You’re the get back man. You’re not the crash the offensive glass man, right? There’s a certain amount of that sort of thing that Cat’s just going to do a couple times every game and it is what it is. The question is how can you avoid some of the other issues that he has defensively like in the Celtics game in pick and roll where he’s doing a different thing on three consecutive Derek White Nima pick and rolls or like just having these these mental lapses where he’ll throw a crazy hard hedge and give up an easy slip or whatever it might be. He’s generally bad in drop coverage because he just struggles with that dance between the ball handler and the uh big man rolling. He’ll give up an easy dunk or he’ll give up an easy driving layup because he just struggles with that sort of thing. And so to me, it’s about limiting Cat’s decision-m on the defensive end as much as possible. The more decisions you have him make, the more likely he is to make a bunch of mistakes. This is where I actually like how much the Knicks were switching on the defensive end last night. They’ve done a lot of switching this season in general, but I talked about this going back to last season. That’s my favorite look for the Knicks is switching with Cat and Brunson rather than hedging or running hedging with Brunson or running drop with Cat. I I want to see situations where those guys have really simple decisions to make and then you put the defensive job, the difficult part of those guys’ job, which is guarding on the ball. put that on those wings to do the rangy help and recover, dig down and recover stuff that can counter and uh and make up for some of the shortcomings from those uh from those two guys, right? So, like for instance, if you go to Cat and it’s like, “Hey man, your dude’s setting a screen, go out and guard the ball. Make sure you’re at the level so you don’t give up an easy catch and shoot through or easy little pull up three off the other side of the screen and just do the best you can to guard the ball. If you get beat, you know, we’ll have a plan for it. try to get beat towards the sideline or whatever it is. Just have basic stuff. Although again, game plan discipline is not cat strength. But you have him just focus on a simple task of guarding the man in front of him. Right now, the second piece of this is you want to avoid what happened at the end of the Celtics game where Brunson’s attacking or excuse me, uh Jaylen Brown’s attacking Jaylen Brunson over and over again and he’s scoring on him one-on-one and then it leads to the blitz. And so now you’re trying to protect Brunson. So you start blitzing Jaylen Brown 30 ft from the basket and it just is really difficult to make those rotations because your defense is too spread out over too large of a of a space, right? In that situation, you only have three defenders within 30 feet of the basket at that point. It’s just really difficult to rotate out of that, right? So, like rather than blitzing or something that compromises your defense too extensively at the beginning of possessions, when Cat and Brunson are struggling one-on-one or you’re trying to send that second defender, send it on the drive. Send it on the drive like you did in this Toronto Raptors game. Have those guys guard and then once the uh the offensive player actually looks to attack and is like head down driving or whatever it is, that’s when you send the second defender. Those are easier rotations to make because you have all five of your defenders, you know, within 20 ft of the basket and you can throw some more traditional closeouts from there. And so again, I I like the switching. I want to see more of it. I want to see less hedging. I want to see less drop, more switching with Kat and Brunson. Don’t send the help aggressively too far away from the basket. Have those guys just press up on the ball. Lean on your help and recover athleticism in the form of Josh Hart, Ojanobi, and Muel Bridges. Now, there’s a certain part of me that will always view the Knicks defense as somewhat vulnerable because of Cat and Brunson, no matter how good they look statistically in the regular season. And by the way, they were 13th in defense last year. It’s not that bad and it’s not that far behind where they are this year, right? But it’s about finding a way to be just a little bit more resilient against the best offenses that you’ll face later on down the line. That will go a long way towards improving their chances.

Jason reacts to the New York Knicks’ NBA Cup quarterfinals win over the Toronto Raptors and specifically calls out how their defense has turned around behind impressive effort from OG Anunoby, Josh Hart, and Mikal Bridges.

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