Mike Brown is no fortune teller, nor does he fancy himself one. But maybe tossing enough strategies into the abyss will assure that some of them work.
In early December, the head coach of the New York Knicks had paired team captain Jalen Brunson with Tyler Kolek, another small point guard, only for disaster to ensue. The night’s opponent, the Boston Celtics, ran wild against those two to close the third quarter, connecting on bucket after bucket, a violent enough spanking to carry the team in green to victory. The unconventional Brunson-Kolek duo drowned, just as many might have anticipated.
Then came redemption.
A couple of weeks later, the Knicks needed an extra ball handler down the stretch of the NBA Cup final. The match didn’t count toward the regular-season standings, but half a million dollars per player was at stake. And with the San Antonio Spurs pressuring Brunson, the man to lean on was Kolek. So, once again, Brown tried Brunson and Kolek together.
This time, it worked.
Brown went back to the two a couple of nights later against the Indiana Pacers. Smooth, again.
“At the beginning of the year, we thought, ‘Ehhh, I don’t know if we’re gonna do that,’” Brown said.
But now, the Knicks have. Brunson and Kolek are a regular twosome, at least for now. And it’s helped Kolek — a second-year former second-round pick, someone who barely played during his rookie season, when he wasn’t yet ready to contribute, especially on the defensive end — emerge as one of the Knicks’ feel-good stories.
But Kolek isn’t the only Kolek anymore.
After the 24-year-old’s breakout, which has turned him into a mainstay in New York’s rotation, it seems like a new Kolek emerges each game. For two weeks, there has been no more common phrase amongst casual fans than, “Wait, who the heck is that guy?!”
First, it was Kolek, who has averaged 10 points, four boards and six assists since that Spurs game. On Friday, it was Kevin McCullar Jr., a second-year forward on a two-way contract who had played 36 career minutes before a bombardment of the Atlanta Hawks. McCullar beat slower players to loose balls, including on one play when he sprawled out of bounds to save one of his four offensive rebounds. He dropped 13 points in Atlanta. On Sunday, it was rookie Frenchman Mohamed Diawara, another former second-rounder, who drained four 3-pointers in the first half of a narrow win over the New Orleans Pelicans. Trey Jemison, another two-way-contracted player, has filled in as a defensive sparkplug.
This seems to be the new way of the Knicks, a Ratatouille-esque belief that anyone can cook, even that unrefined, inexperienced and once-forgotten second-rounder.
“Knowing that you’re flowing, playing, now it gives you even more energy, because now you’re like, you feel like you contribute, whatever, knowing you might get called,” Mikal Bridges told reporters Monday, as relayed by The Athletic’s James Edwards. “So, it’s just a different energy for the bench and especially when we make runs and stuff, if there’s 10 guys that play, nine guys that play, everybody is so juiced up. … If (you) played three minutes, if (you) played four minutes just as that low man to help blitz — you did something.”
During Monday’s win in New Orleans, the Knicks played 12 guys just in the first half.
This is, of course, an organizational shift.
Not even a year ago, Bridges was the one who fielded a question about high minutes for the starters, then responded that players beyond just the regulars were capable of playing, too. He advocated for a wider distribution of playing time. Knicks fans surely remember the drama that followed. At the time, then head coach Tom Thibodeau, interpreted the comments as a personal shot. Other coaches on staff felt the same. Bridges and Thibodeau held a private meeting to clear the air.
Come the postseason, the Knicks leaned on a seven-man rotation.
They ended a disciplined and massively successful season, which included a run to the Eastern Conference finals, in a manner that was more disorganized than their personality would have suggested. They went down 2-0 to the Pacers, then began to scramble through lineups, ones with seldom-used bench players, like Landry Shamet and Delon Wright, that they had never turned to before — at least, not in any consequential way.
For all the talk of minutes, minutes, minutes under Thibodeau, the bigger issue was never the total time Bridges or Brunson or Josh Hart spent on the court. It was the number of lineups they deployed. It wasn’t that Hart would run for 38 minutes. After all, what’s an extra 180 seconds for an elite athlete? It was that those 38 minutes tended to be alongside the same players each night.
Once the Knicks reached up their sleeve, hoping to grab an unexpected look, an inevitable task during any team’s playoff run, they didn’t know what they would find. The mixing and matching of previously unused lineups over the final four games of the Pacers series, which the Knicks eventually lost in six games, was one element some Thibodeau doubters inside the front office pointed to as justification for his unexpected ousting, league sources said.
The next coach, the Knicks signaled during their coaching search over the summer, would require the opposite approach.
Regardless of whether he believed a lineup would work, he needed the open-mindedness to explore various combinations. Experimenting with lineups throughout the regular season could cost the team a win here or there. But the Knicks’ goal wasn’t to win 55 games. It was to win 16. More evidence about who plays well next to whom would help them when the unavoidable sleeve-reach came in April, May or, they hoped, June.
With Brown at the helm, this year’s version of Delon Wright, whoever it is, might not be so unfamiliar with high-pressure moments while donning a Knicks jersey.
Miles McBride’s return from injury gives Mike Brown a longer, more defensive-minded guard off the bench. Ishika Samant/Getty Images
Every once in a while, two players who have no business developing chemistry somehow do; it’s the beauty of basketball. Brunson and Kolek played only one possession together all last season, according to Cleaning to Glass. For two weeks, especially before Miles “Deuce” McBride returned from injury Monday, the duo became a staple.
It might not stick around. Brown was wary about the pairing for intuitive reasons. Issues emerge when two small, offensive-slanted guards plop atop a defense. And now, McBride, a longer defensive hound, is back. He closed the team’s most-recent victory in New Orleans. But at least now Brown has seen it: Ways Brunson and Kolek could work, and other ways they won’t.
He’s watched Diawara get hot from deep, a rarity that he now knows is possible.
He’s seen McCullar dive onto the court for a loose ball, which inspired a usual bench warmer to pull up for an audacious 3-pointer in transition only moments later. The ball swished into the net.
Trial and error hasn’t hurt the Knicks in the short term. They are second in the East and pacing to win 59 games, which would be their highest total since they reeled off a franchise-record 60 in 1993.
“(It’s) just knowing that the work you put in, you might get your name called,” Bridges said.
This is what the Knicks wanted, someone willing to jostle around the pieces, identify the good and throw away the ugly. And now, they exist in this bizarro world, where they almost lost the NBA Cup final but didn’t because Kolek came to the rescue.
Where they almost fell to the sliding Hawks but didn’t because McCullar out-hustled the world.
Where they almost crumbled to the Pelicans but stayed in it early because Diawara couldn’t miss.
Where they are relying on unglamorous third-stringers but still piling up victories.
— The Athletic’s James L. Edwards III contributed to this story.