{"id":697126,"date":"2026-04-04T03:34:16","date_gmt":"2026-04-04T03:34:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/697126\/"},"modified":"2026-04-04T03:34:16","modified_gmt":"2026-04-04T03:34:16","slug":"knicks-rout-lottery-bound-bulls-by-40-without-karl-anthony-towns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/697126\/","title":{"rendered":"Knicks rout lottery-bound Bulls by 40 without Karl-Anthony Towns"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ahead of tipoff against the Chicago Bulls on Friday, Knicks head coach Mike Brown said he wasn\u2019t 100% pleased with where his team stood with five games left on the regular-season schedule before the playoffs begin in mid-April.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou always want your team to be playing at the highest of high cylinders. Do I think we\u2019re there right now? No. Do I have belief in this team? Yes I do,\u201d Brown said. \u201cI\u2019ve seen us play really good basketball throughout the course of the year. Even in games where there\u2019s quote-unquote manufactured pressure. We\u2019ve played really good basketball. So I like what we have in that locker room, and I like the things that we\u2019ve done this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I expect more from myself first, and everybody else second.\u201d<\/p>\n

If only the Knicks could play the Bulls 82 times a year.<\/p>\n

The Knicks, who were without Karl-Anthony Towns (elbow) took the NBA Draft Lottery-bound Bulls to the woodshed and outscored them 20-1 to begin an all-out avalanche of a 136-96 victory at Madison Square Garden on Friday.<\/p>\n

The Knicks led by as many as 47 points, marking their second-largest advantage of any game this season. Their biggest margin of victory was a 54-point rout of the Brooklyn Nets on Jan. 21.<\/a><\/p>\n

And one game after beating the Memphis Grizzlies<\/a>, another lottery-bound team, without Jalen Brunson, the Knicks beat the Bulls without their All-Star center. Towns was downgraded to questionable Friday morning, shot around ahead of tipoff against Chicago, then grimaced and grabbed at his arm before leaving the floor and being ruled out for the night with a right elbow impingement.<\/p>\n

Mitchell Robinson started in place of Towns, and the Knicks dominated the Bulls from the opening tipoff. They won the first quarter, 38-16, and the second period, 40-25.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought our start against Oklahoma City was pretty good, and the last game [against Memphis] was pretty good. A lot of it has been our defense. Our defense has been pretty good overall. I think we\u2019re seventh or eighth defensively. So to have a top 10 defense is pretty good, especially because at one point in time we were 22nd or 23rd,\u201d said Brown. \u201cBut if you break the defense down by quarters, in the first quarter we\u2019re 19th right now. In the fourth quarter we\u2019re first by a mile.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo for us to bring that same sense of urgency to start the game defensively, is gonna be big for us. We have to make sure we don\u2019t go out and foul and that pick-and-roll coverage is on point and we\u2019re not giving up any easy (baskets) in transition.\u201d<\/p>\n

It all began with Brunson, who scored 17 points on 13 shot attempts, but dished 10 assists to just two turnovers.<\/p>\n

The All-Star guard averaged more assists per game last March (8.9) than any other month of his career. And on Friday, the Knicks didn\u2019t need Brunson to do what he does best\u2013score at a high rate. Ball movement alone was enough to beat the Bulls, who won six of their first seven games of the season and have now dropped nine of their last 11.<\/p>\n

The ball found OG Anunoby early and often.<\/p>\n

Anunoby scored a game-high 31 points and made seven 3s on 10 attempts, marking his second-highest scoring game of the season. He scored 25 points in the Brunson-less win over the Grizzlies and said in his walk-off interview at MSG that an All-Star missing from the starting lineup doesn\u2019t change his approach to a game.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo. I\u2019m always trying to be aggressive,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd if the ball finds me, I\u2019m making shots.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robinson added 17 points, 11 rebounds, two steals and a block, and both Mikal Bridges (23 minutes) and Josh Hart (28) saw lightened workloads as the Knicks made quick work of the Bulls on Friday.<\/p>\n

Collin Sexton scored 19 points off the bench for Chicago, but no starters in red and white scored more than 13 points. Guerschon Yabusele, in his first game back at Madison Square Garden since the trade, scored five points on two-of-nine shooting from the field.<\/p>\n

The Knicks remain the East\u2019s No. 3 seed and have a 1.5-game cushion on the No. 4 Cleveland Cavaliers, who own the easiest remaining schedule in the NBA<\/a> with five games left to play. New York remains 2.5 games behind the No. 2 Boston Celtics, who whooped the Milwaukee Bucks on Friday.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re still trying to fight for [playoff] positioning, so for us, we\u2019re gonna try to keep guys healthy \u2014 which is up to the basketball gods and performance staff,\u201d Brown said. \u201cWe\u2019ll just play our guys to try to win games and continue to get better in different areas offensively and defensively while trying to get a win.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Knicks got a win. In fact, they have two in a row. They\u2019ll have a chance to make it three against the No. 5 Atlanta Hawks on the road on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of tipoff against the Chicago Bulls on Friday, Knicks head coach Mike Brown said he wasn\u2019t 100%…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":697127,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3768],"tags":[7,920,304,6,1136,191,3810,3806,741],"class_list":{"0":"post-697126","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-knicks","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-bulls","10":"tag-knicks","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-knicks","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkknicks","16":"tag-og-anunoby"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116344345639274276","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697126\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/697127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}