Mikal Bridges speaks, and his Knicks teammates listen
The Knicks' Mikal Bridges warms up before an NBA game against the Chicago Bulls on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. Credit: AP/Kena Betancur
When the Knicks lost in Chicago on Friday, their third straight defeat, Mike Brown spoke animatedly of the team’s failings, the lack of defensive physicality, and he spoke openly.
“Got to keep telling them the truth,” he said. “I’m going to keep coaching them. I’m going to keep trying to keep putting them in the best position to win.”
But what he really wanted to see was how the Knicks would respond to the first bit of adversity they had faced under this new regime. Would they step up? Would they match the intensity he was pleading for?
It came, of course, from Jalen Brunson, who attacked offensively from the start Sunday in the rematch with the Bulls. It came off the bench from Josh Hart, who showed the infectious energy that has marked his tenure in New York.
It also came from an unlikely source: Mikal Bridges.
Bridges spent his first season with the Knicks in the background, trying to find his place in a group that already had achieved success without him. At the same time, he was trying to live up to the cost the franchise paid to bring him to the Garden — five first-round picks and a pick swap, assets that the team had been hoarding.
So early in the game, it might have surprised even his teammates when he and Brunson raced back to try to defend a fast break and saw the initial shot that missed become an easy putback as OG Anunoby, Karl-Anthony Towns and Mitchell Robinson never made it past halfcourt. As the Knicks called time, Bridges shouted at his teammates, a discussion that continued on the bench, where he implored them to hustle back on defense.
The boxscore will show Bridges with 10 points and nine assists on Sunday, but maybe the contribution that didn’t show up there was lending his voice to a team in need of it.
“I don’t really know the dynamics of last year, so it’s hard for me to compare it to last year,” Brown said before Monday’s tipoff against the Washington Wizards. “Just, in general, everybody needs to hold everybody accountable. And there may be times where somebody comes at me and I can’t take it personal.
“I’ve got to just be in the moment and understand how to handle it then. So we need players and coaches to hold each other accountable, and none of us should take it personal when it happens. So if it happens, it’s great. I’m all for it.”
Much like Bridges a year ago, Brown is stepping into a team that already was successful. And Brown is under pressure to prove that he is going to be the latest piece to help the franchise move forward. The Knicks have a captain in Brunson who is well-respected in the locker room and can speak his mind. But another voice raised can’t hurt.
“I’ve seen him do it before,” said Hart, who, like Brunson, has known Bridges since their days at Villanova. “I think he’s extremely comfortable in himself, the system, the situation. Obviously, when you have that comfort level, you feel confident in kind of speaking up, saying what you see.”
Brown knows that being a leader is hard. “Not everybody is going to like you all the time and you’ve got to be OK with it,” he said. “In today’s age, it’s a little tougher for guys to do that because the way the world is, everybody wants to be liked to a certain degree. Everybody wants a sense of approval. So you usually have a couple [voices and] two voices are stronger than one, or at least the individuals may feel two voices are stronger than one. So that’s how I look at it. The captain’s a good thing.”
Maybe it was Bridges’ unexpected words or simply the team realizing that in the face of adversity, the group needed to rise together, but the Knicks took the game over from that point Sunday.
After two straight wins to start the season and then the three straight losses, the Knicks won Sunday and hoped that with seven straight games at the Garden, they can begin to find their way.
“Just consistency,” Brown said. “We didn’t play great last night, but we played good for most of the game, so trying to begin to not only string some quarters together throughout the course of one game but string some games together.
“There’s a lot of talented teams and people in this league, and the thing that separates the great ones from the talented ones is the great ones are consistent. So you’re trying to figure out how to bring a level of consistency to whatever we’re trying to do on both ends of the floor is what I want to start seeing from our guys.”
Notes & quotes: Mitchell Robinson sat out Monday on the second night of a back-to-back, with the team calling it left ankle injury management.
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.
