Jalen Brunson shows Knicks are worthy of ‘tough’ label in heroic Game 2 performance

NEW YORK — Tom Thibodeau immediately knew something was off. Jalen Brunson never asks out of games, yet there he was, jogging down the court with 3:35 remaining in the first quarter and gesturing toward the bench, telling Thibodeau he needed to come out.

Three seconds later, he was headed back to the locker room. While defending T.J. McConnell on a drive he’d felt something in his right foot. He didn’t know what it was, only that it didn’t feel right. “Discomfort,” is how he’d describe it later.

 The Knicks led the Indiana Pacers by nine when he exited. Brunson remained in the locker room for the rest of the first half. His teammates were confused. Donte DiVincenzo didn’t know where he went. 

“Where’s Jalen?” Knicks wing Josh Hart asked a staffer behind the bench. 

When they joined him at the break, the Knicks trailed by 10. They looked to be on the verge of losing home court advantage in this second round series. The players still believed, but inside Madison Square Garden, where the energy had flipped from electric to anxious, it was clear the crowd did not.

Until five minutes remained in halftime. Suddenly, the fans who hadn’t fled for the concessions roared. Brunson had emerged from the tunnel and was bouncing around, testing out his foot. Chants of M-V-P rained down on him as he shot free-throws. They reached his teammates back in the locker room.

“I had a decision to make,” Brunson would say later, “And I made a decision.”

The Knicks blitzed the Pacers in the second-half Wednesday night, scoring twice as many points as them en route to a 130-121 victory. The win gave them a 2-0 series lead in this Eastern Conference semifinals. Brunson finished with 29 points on 11-for-18 shooting. The Knicks outscored the Pacers by 26 points in the 32 minutes he played. 

“When he’s out there, there’s a level of calmness and a level of we’re going to get the right shot every time,” DiVincenzo said after the game. “There’s a level of confidence from everybody that we have him on the court with us, and everybody can settle down and play their own game.”

Speaking to reporters after the win, Brunson deflected when asked about the injury. He wasn’t sure how the injury happened. What was he doing when testing out the injury at halftime? “Testing it.” How was he feeling now? “I’m all good.”

Early in the third quarter, that didn’t look to be the case. Brunson spent large chunks of possessions camped out in the corner. He gave up the ball and passed up some hand-off opportunities from Isaiah Hartenstein. His burst seemed gone.

He found his legs as the quarter went on, burying the Pacers with an onslaught of jumpers. The Knicks, however, couldn’t escape the quarter without seeing another rotation player go down. This time it was OG Anunoby, who had racked up 28 points, leaving with a hamstring injury. He didn’t return. And this on the heels of the announcement that Mitchell Robinson, who entered the season as the team’s starting center, would miss the remainder of the playoffs with an ankle injury, joining Julius Randle and Bojan Bogdanovic.

The Knicks had no update on Anunoby after the game. Can they really keep this run going if yet another key member of their rotation is forced to miss time? 

“There’s a blueprint here that Thibs has laid out,” DiVincenzo said. “Any game we play, as long as we defend, rebound and have low turnovers we can win.”

The Knicks didn’t defend well Wednesday night, but they took care of the ball and clobbered the Pacers on the glass. They were tenacious and relentless, rattling a young Pacers team and coaxing them into mistakes. They took their blows and plowed forward, like they have all season.

But it was the presence of their MVP which carried them home. 

“Alright, Willis,” Knicks wing Josh Hart called out in the locker room after the game as Brunson walked to his stall. There was more synergy to the reference than Hart might have realized.

It was on this date 54 years earlier that a hobbled Reed had jogged onto the Madison Square Garden floor for Game 7 of the finals to propel the Knicks to a title. Brunson returning for the second half of a second round series wasn’t that. But it will, like Reed’s, be a moment Knicks fans don’t forget.

Yaron Weitzman is an NBA writer for FOX Sports and the author of Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports. Follow him on Twitter @YaronWeitzman.

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