Knicks match franchise record with 84 points in first half to rout Bulls
Knicks guard Jalen Brunson makes a three-pointer over Chicago Bulls forward Noa Essengue in the first half of an NBA basketball game at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
As the Knicks slogged their way through the opening weeks of the season, a step slow at times, the shots that fell in last season’s championship run clanking off the rim this time, they waited patiently, confident that it would click at some point.
With the Chicago Bulls and their ranking of last in points allowed arriving at Madison Square Garden, it was time.
The Knicks matched a franchise-record with 84 points in the first half, built leads of as many as 44 points and Jalen Brunson felt like he could have threatened a franchise record for points if the game was close enough for him to keep shooting. Brunson settled for 33 points to lead the Knicks to a 135-105 win at Madison Square Garden. The Knicks evened their record at 4-4 and maybe allowed the team to breathe a sigh of relief.
The early season stumbles had quickly raised questions of what was wrong and where were the signs of the team that had rolled through a historic postseason run to capture the first title for the franchise in 53 years.
But if it was only a matter of time for the defending champs, that certainly was the case for Brunson. It was Brunson in the first quarter, almost a solo act as he poured in 22 points on 8-for-10 shooting from the floor, outscoring the Bulls by himself as the Knicks built a 43-21 lead. While the outcome of the game may have already seemed set, the basket opening for Brunson may have seemed like he was bound for a special night.
Asked if he ever gets to a point where he might ask a coach to let him keep going after a start like that, he said, “Maybe. I mean, possibly, but it has to be the right moment, the right time. I’m not sure. I don’t want to say no, because you never know if you’re in that situation. I just want to respect the game as much as possible.”
The Knicks shooting had been off, Mikal Bridges had been mired in another one of his regular season funks and even Brunson was not delivering the offensive consistency that had carried them to the championship. Brunson's shooting percentages were down and teams were working hard to limit his production.
The first half explosion matched the output from Nov. 18, 1988 against Philadelphia. The Knicks entered the night ranked 27th in the NBA in points per game — although the only other outlier came against the Bulls earlier this season when they scored 133.
“We know we can play better,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said before the game. “The crazy part about it is we're 3-1 in our last four. Knowing that we're hungry for more, and that strive for perfection is going to help us out when it really counts, I think, at the end of the day.
"So we just can’t let go of the rope, we have to keep trying to get better on both sides of the ball and make sure that we’re embracing the little things so that we can hit a groove so we’ll be where we want to be at the end of the season But knowing that we’re going to go through ups and downs throughout the course of the year.”
When Brunson went to the bench to start the second quarter, the production from the rest of the offense didn’t drop, the team scoring 41 points in the quarter even with Brunson adding just four points — all from the free-throw line. OG Anunoby had 11 of his 18 points in the period and Bridges was 3-for-3 from the floor, scoring all seven of his points and shaking off the struggles that had trailed him through the early part of the season. Even Dalton Knecht made his Knicks debut and scored five of his 10 points in the period.
It’s not the first time in his Knicks tenure that Bridges has found himself struggling during the regular season and it’s not the first time that the question of the price paid to obtain and the sense of keeping him in blue and orange has been raised. But the saving grace for Bridges has been his playoff performances and the championship trophy that he was a huge part of bringing to New York.
“Our starters are going to get a lot more rope than the guy's coming off the bench, you know?” Mike Brown said before Wednesday’s game. “And that's kind of how I look at it. Again, this is a process and I have to always be careful of not trying to want [perfection]. You want it, but you can't live and die by trying to have everything be great and/or perfect in a matter of a week or two weeks."
But that hasn’t meant that Brown won’t shorten the rope for Bridges. In just the second game of the season with Bridges enduring an 0-for-8 shooting performance in a loss to Boston he played just 21 minutes and 53 seconds. After returning to normal usage in the next two games, he has played just 13 and 16 minutes in two of the last three games. Bridges played almost 22 minutes Wednesday night.
Combining his struggles, shooting just 30.8% overall, 26.9% from three with the play of Landry Shamet, has brought back questions of whether the Knicks might be better with Shamet in the starting lineup than Bridges. Or even if Shamet, who is on a much more affordable four-year, $24 million contract signed in the summer, might make moving on from Bridges a sensible move, opening up salary cap space for the contract extensions the team is considering for Karl-Anthony Towns, Josh Hart, Deuce McBride and Tyler Kolek. Bridges is in the first year of a four-year, $150 million contract extension.
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
