Knicks vs Thunder | Opening Monologue | POSTGAME RECAP

0:00What's up, y'all? This MDA season, don't let an injury rule out your bet. Other sportsbooks let injuries box you out, but Finatics sportsbook fair play protects all bets from first half injury. So if your player goes down with an injury, Finatics keeps your bet out of the court. Make the switch and get more waste of win with Finatics sportsbook. Winning hits different here. Nicks do have a timeout left. Get it into Brunson, Brunson, three-pointer. Won't go. Rebound chip. Take the Miami-N-N-O-B. And an-O-B for time. Sure. And the Thunder hold on and win here at the Garden. Two good looks, two good chances to tie the game. But it wouldn't fall in a terrific battle between two of the NBA's elite. All righty. Welcome to the Nicks Film School Postgame Show presented by Finatics sportsbook. Where I wish I did not have to start out the show like I'm going to have to start out the show. Because that was not a good basketball game between two good or even very good basketball teams.

1:05That was a great basketball game between two great basketball teams. And the Oklahoma City Thunder, obviously the defending champions. I can't say enough about them, exceptional team, exceptional team. But the thing about the Thunder and the fact that they are an exceptional team is that they are exceptional enough with just the five guys that they have out on the floor wearing the Thunder uniforms. That is enough for them to engage in a competitive basketball game against the best of the best. When you put them five on five against any team, it's going to be the matter of how good the other team is. It's going to be a great game because they have a lot of talent on that side of the ball. You do not need to give them an extra three guys because when it goes from five on five to five on eight, then an already exceptional Thunder team unfortunately becomes unbeatable.

2:10And that was the situation the next needed to deal with tonight. And look, again, I really don't want to talk about this. If you guys have been watching me for a while, anybody listening on the podcast, you know there have been many a night over the years, years that I have been doing this. Where people lost their minds about the refs after a particular game. And I was like, eh, that's not where I want to focus my energy. There were things the nicks could have done better or differently tonight to win the basketball game. That's not different tonight. There were things the nicks could have done differently tonight to win the basketball game. They lost the game by three points and they missed six free throws. So right there, just three throws alone. And there were some other things that we could talk about. But I thought they largely played an exceptional game. And they did not get a fair fight. They didn't get a fair shake.

3:11And that's always unfortunate. And it's a problem that the league has, I would say, been dealing with for a while. But the reality is they haven't dealing with it because the problem has been getting worse and worse. We are further away from knowing what, like what calls are for refs knowing what calls are and what calls aren't. Then we probably have ever been. And because as the commissioner tells you, it's a highlight league and you know what they don't show in highlights? They don't show fucked up calls. So I don't think they're spending one ounce of extra time in the league offices over at whatever the fuck Olympic Plaza worrying about this shit. But I digress. It's just really unfortunate because that was such a, you know, was it always a well played game? Not necessarily, but the reason it wasn't always a well played game is you had two teams full of dogs trying their asses off. And then it's obviously gave everything that they had to try to win that one and came up just short.

4:18And you just wish it would have been fair. But between, I mean, it's, we, it started right out of the gate, but like, you know, when the, when the third foul on SGA, which was very clearly a third foul on SGA was not called the third foul on SGA in the first half, you knew we're going to be in for some bullshit. And then there were other little signs and drips and jabs along the game that you're like, all right, all right, not the end of the world. We'll deal with it. And then the two overturn calls one on, so an OG will could have been an N1 was overturned to an offensive foul. That's three points right there. There's your, there's your tie game. And then the cat proximate foul, which like how you can, how you can call a proximate foul there on review. I just, and of course, then cat ends up fouling out. So it's, look, I'm not spending the whole monologue talking about this. I'm sure other people are going to bring it up, but I just, again, I didn't want, I didn't know where I wanted to start.

5:19But it's where I had to start. So where do we go from here? There is a part of me that wants to, from here, talk about all of the things that I think we're very encouraging about this game. All of the things that I did think the nicks figured out defensively against a team that when they are hitting shots and the Oklahoma City Thunder tonight hit 38% from three on 42 attempts. Like there's a lot of nights where if that team hits 38% from three on 42 attempts, you're just not going to be in the basketball game, even if you are a very good team. And the nicks were right there. So I thought the nicks did a lot of things. They figured out a lot of things defensively. I'm looking for, I could start with that. I could start with the fact that obviously the nicks had a, about as bad a shooting night as you could reasonably expect. And they were still in the basketball game. And some of the things that I thought went well on offense, some of the things that I thought were a little tougher on offense.

6:20I could start any of those places. And yet I would be remiss to start anywhere other than with Carl Antony Towns. Because my own personal biggest question coming into this game was with the nice stretch that Carl Antony Towns has been having. And he has had a very, very, very nice stretch. It has been his best stretch of the season. If you want to look at it from an overall team impact standpoint, you could argue that it is his best stretches and nick. Although he had obviously some brilliant individual stretches last season, I was looking at Towns. And I was looking at a team and I talked about this earlier today on Weekly Wagers with Sean. I talked about it a little bit with Jeremy. You knew the thunder were going to take him out of anything that he maybe wanted to try to do. And I don't know that there was a single possession shooting possession or any possession really from Towns tonight, the likes of which you're used to seeing from him over the course of a normal game.

7:28And so in that sense, you could say, all right, they accomplished their goal. And yet he found every way possible still to impact the basketball game in a positive way. And that goes for both ends of the court defensively. I thought he was extremely engaged throughout the entire evening. He's engaged as you're ever going to see him as honestly, I know we found out, but as good as you're ever going to see him. So on that side, it was great. And then on the other end, nine offensive rebounds, 17 offensive rebounds total only took eight shots. Most of those were on put back attempts. He was what his team needed him to be tonight, given how they were given the game plan that they were running. So I think in that sense, for Towns to be that effective against that team that has the sort of personnel that can really take the nicks out of what they want to do and take town specifically out of some of the stuff that he likes to do.

8:35I think you have to consider it a positive night. Now, here's why I'm really encouraged for everything I just said, I think that there's more meat on the bone. Obviously, you look at the three point attempts for the next tonight. There's only three nicks that did not take a three point attempt. Jeremy Sohan, Ariel Hock-40, and Karl Anthony Towns. There are ways to spring him for threes even against this team. He didn't take one tonight. I think there's meat on the bone there. That's number one. And then number two. And I saw Benji tweeted about this during the game. There are mismatched opportunities. There's always going to be mismatched opportunities against the thunder. The thunder are better than any team in the league at almost baiting you into thinking there are opportunities and then either forcing a turnover or converging or any of those sorts of things. I still think there are ways to get him a little bit more involved in traditional offensive sets. Again, even against this team. And maybe part of the reason why we didn't see some of that is because the rest of the team was just like nobody really had a going.

9:38And they weren't in the thunder were kind of daring them to pull up from three. And nobody really wanted to pull up from three because tired legs, shots weren't falling the whole thing. But overall incredibly encouraged by the performance. And just any critique I have is more on what more can they do from a game plan perspective. What more can they do? What more can Towns teammates do? There was one stretch. There was one stretch in the second quarter, very early in the second quarter. Why I thought maybe Towns could do a little bit more to be aggressive and get positioning and such. Other than that, I mean, look, he was the player of the game for the next. And I don't think it was particularly close. Although there was one guy off the bench that we're certainly going to talk about. Okay, wanted to start with Kat. And from there, I think we have to go from one all star to another. And it's going to be a little bit more complicated to talk about the second one and that's Jalen Brunson. I don't actually think that there's much to say about Jalen Brunson's game.

10:41But again, for me to sit here and talk about all other sorts of things and not acknowledge the fact that Jalen Brunson just had one of his worst shooting performance of the season would be extraordinarily disingenuous. Because if Carlisle had any towns or Michele Bridges or even like Josh Hart had the shooting performance that Jalen Brunson just had, it would be the first thing out of my mouth on the post game. So yeah, we obviously are going to sit here and praise Jalen Brunson and commend him for taking three charges and battling like all hell on the defensive end throughout the entire evening. And given it everything he has, you knew he was giving it everything he had and still finding ways to help his team on offense. 15 assists to three turnovers against this team. That is an insane ratio because they turn you over like crazy. And by the way, some of those three turnovers are very annoying, but this is the thunder. This is what they do. And by the way, in a game they lost by three, Jalen Brunson was still a plus three in 39 grueling minutes.

11:46All that's commendable. But if Jalen Brunson has a nine for 18 night instead of a five for 18 night, we're sitting here and we're talking about a different result. He had opportunities not only at the end there from the corner yet other opportunities throughout the night. It just wasn't Jalen Brunson's game. I'm not making any more of it other than what it is, which was a terrible shooting game for him. And here's what I'm definitely not going to do. I'm not going to sit here and say, no, we should normally expect Brunson to go out there and shoot 13 for 18 against the thunder and get to the foul line of bunch and have 30 points. No, Thunder are great. Lou Dorth's awesome. This is a first team wall defense guy for a reason, but you're not going to see this performance offensive from Jalen Brunson on a regular basis, even against this team. So they needed more from JB tonight, even if he gave them basically everything he could, they needed more. Some other stuff from there that we could go to in no particular order. Mike Brown, I thought this was a really, really, really well coach game from Mike Brown.

12:51You saw him pull out multiple stops in this game. You saw him go small several times. We finally saw so hand at the five for a couple of minutes there at the end of, I think it was after at the end of the second quarter from recalling correctly. You saw some different combinations. I really, really, really loved and I guess we could transition to talking a little bit about some of what worked tonight. I loved their defensive approach. I thought they execute or they they had the proper level of aggression in terms of going out with hard hedges. You know, the occasional actual double on SGA, like anything to just try to throw him off his game a little bit. You look at SGA's final stat line, 26 points on 16 shots. He's the MVP. He's one of the best players in the game. Like there is no stopping him. You only literally hope to contain him and like give the dude credit. Game on the line, not game on the line, but like needed one more bucket first team.

13:53You're step back three nasty, nasty, nasty shit with OGN and OB draped all over him. And that's, you know, look, he's one of the three best players in the game. And he's on track to have a career that we're going to be talking about for a long time. But considering how dangerous he is and considering that in the first half, they had a guy in chat home grin equal his career high and made threes in a game. In just the first half. And again, they shot 38% from three on 42 attempts. And then you throw in the reps and the fact that they got to line 25 times and how many of those were legit. To hold that team into 103 points means you did, you did good stuff defensively. The effort was there. The execution was there. And oh, by the way, you know, Mitchell Robinson tonight. And look, I know they didn't have Jaydub and Jaydub is awesome. He is a delicious one on one score.

14:55And he makes your life more difficult when he's in there. As good as Casey Wallace is as good as Ludoort was actually from the field tonight. How about Ludoort with that big midi at the end of a defensive possession? Good defensive possession in the fourth quarter. That was really big. You know, they have shot makers, Jaydub's on a different level. But you could argue that the nicks not having Mitchell Robinson. And I thought Huck was pretty good defensively in the game. But you could argue the next night having Mitchell Robinson. And again, them still holding the thunder to a hundred deep points. That's great. So I love the defensive game plan from Mike Brown. And then on offense, I mean, you had the 40 point third quarter, a lot of transition in there, obviously feeding off the energy of the garden. Landry Shamiko and Crazy are going to talk about shaman in a bit. The other three quarters are combined for 60 points. I was watching the game and thinking to myself possession after possession, like, what else could they be doing? And look, I'm sure there are smarter minds than me out there who watch this game.

15:55And I'm like, oh, do this, do this, try that. The thunder just, they take away so much. And they're so good. And it's again, they're not the best defense in the league. They're the best defense in the league by a comfortable margin. So like, and on a night when, you know, by the, by the fourth quarter, like, the thunder were just conceited. Like, they were going on just greens. Like, they were conceding. If you want to pull up from three, anybody on an uniform, you could pull up from three. We'll let you have the shot. And the judge, I mean, whether it was just tired legs or they knew, like, you know, you look at some of the three point shooting totals. Brunson, here's the honestly the most damning thing. The fact that Jalen Brunson only took five threes, let you know. And obviously two of them were the back-to-back, massive ones in the third quarter to end that period. But like, he only took three other threes in the entire game, chose you how much he wasn't feeling it from deep. Bridges one of five, I don't know, we four or 13.

16:55And then Shammett didn't hit it three, I've rotted it in it three, oh, three, oh, two respectively. So it just, if you're not going to hit three, if you're not going to hit three again, you're going to shoot sub 30% against his team. And you get good looks. Another of them got good looks tonight. It's just, it's too much of an uphill battle. And the fact that they were right there. So really no complaints about the defensive game plan. I'll find some game plan thought the Mike Brown coach is a really good game. Leftson points on the board with the free throws talked about that, talked about the shooting lock. If you want to call it that. If you want to be critical, I guess we, and this is tough because Josh Hart, dealing with a bad back. For a lot of the game, I thought, again, given how good the thunder defense is, there were absolutely possessions where, and again, this is going to be a conversation all the way through the rest of the season, all the way through the playoffs about the utilization of Josh Hart and how they try to, you turn the, how teams they're defending him against the team that is defending him in that way.

18:00I think DJ said last night during the monologue that tonight would be a good evidence gathering or information gathering game for the next. And I think it was exactly that. I thought you gained some information gathered some information about how you can counter this specific defense with them guarding Josh Hart that way. Did it hurt them on some possessions? Did you feel that hurt? Absolutely. Did they start to utilize it to their advantage down the stretch at the end? And that's when the thunder were most locked in. Yes, they did. And Hart obviously scored a couple baskets in crunch time there late. I remain encouraged. They're going to be able to figure this out even against the best defenses. And again, I'm not, you can't disparage Hart at all because the guy toughed out 25 minutes and had 10 and 12. So this is no shade on him or even Mike Brown. It's just going to be a process. But against certain teams, you are going to need a fifth shooter on the floor.

19:01And tonight that fifth shooter was Landry shaman. And I've been singing Landry shaman at the praises all year. I'm not going to stop anytime soon. I think he is establishing himself as the best prime or as best minimum contract signing in the NBA this year. And as I've said many times, don't want to know where the next would be without him. He was a plus 12 in his 31 minutes again in a game. The next lost by three. That tells you everything you need to know. And again, Landry shaman even could not buy a bucket from three. So you know the whole next team was just kind of off. Over three except for one guy. And that's Muhammad Dior. Now I could see there being some complaints about the fact that Muhammad Dior went three or four from the field three or four from three and only played 13 minutes. What gives? It's tough because the guy is a bolt of energy when he's out there. He's confident from three. He makes threes. But he is I'm going to keep having to say this.

20:02He's still a rookie. And you're still going to hear rookie mistakes. And the little stretch he had before Mike pulled Mike Brown pulled them from the game for the last time. You saw some of those rookie mistakes. And against this thundered team, you just can't. Can see possession. You have to make every possession worth it. Now, obviously there is a push and pull there. And it's a it's a it's a it's a tight rope to walk that topped up. It'll never walk correctly because in, you know, if it's tibs, Muhammad Dior is not getting 13 minutes in this game. Muhammad Dior is getting zero minutes in this game. You know, so from Mike Brown, it's tough where it's like, how much do we roll the dice? On a on a rookie that clearly does a lot of good things, but it's going to be prone to mistakes occasionally. There are going to be people who say who say you should roll the dice more tonight. I hear you. I was comfortable with the usage of Muhammad Dior tonight. And I'll just take the opportunity to say.

21:03From Muhammad Dior to come into a game like that. A national television. I guess that team. And give his team the jolt in the arm that they needed and the off and give them the offensive life support essentially to resuscitate them, which is exactly what those three felt like in the moment. I mean, you just we keep saying it can't say it enough. The kid is the kid is a real player and it's a matter of how high it goes not if it continues to go high. So credit to Muhammad Dior for his showing. Just I'll end here and then there are other specifics that we get to. I thought OG was a men is defensively as sequence early in the game with the block and the steal on chat. That was just absolutely insane. You know what I didn't mention? Some of Cal bridges. Macau bridges went six or 17 from the field. Don't look great. One of five from three.

22:03Don't look great. Didn't have an assist for rebounds. Okay. Don't look great. What similar to the town's conversation. What have we been yelling and screaming for Macau bridges to do since he got here and a lot this year. Be physical. Get in. Get into the basketball game in the ways that this Nick team. Was known for getting into games in a certain way. And he never did that enough and you know what tonight. I thought he did it. I really thought he did. I thought his physicality that was there. I thought his approach was the right approach. So. I appreciated that even on a night where again you look at his shooting line. You look at Brunson shooting line. You look at an OB shooting line. I mean literally three of them six or 17 six or 17 five or 18. And they were and they were right there. You just which again the ref part kills you too. Credit to Mike Brown. Forget the tech after SGA didn't pick up the third foul there.

23:05Talked about heart fighting. Love champ. It's defense. Yeah. I mean they fought. They fought. The thing. That sent me off a ledge. The night of the pistol game wasn't that they lost or. Or it's it's they didn't fight. They fought tonight and they fought for 48 minutes. And they never let go of the rope. And I get it if you want to be like. We're supposed to be a title container here like moral victories. Like go go sell that shit somewhere else. Not for me. Not today. Or not tonight. I'm. There haven't been many nights this year. Where I've been more impressed with this team. Then I am right now. And I mean that. Really appreciate the effort and everything they brought to the table tonight.

24:08Even though they came up short. So. Yeah. That's really it. Yeah. Annoyed the rest, but we've nothing to hang your head about tonight. If you're a Nick fan and you're. You're excited for what lies ahead. So yeah. There you go. Must be 21 or over gambling problem. Call 1 800 gambler. Connecticut. Call 888-789-77777. Massachusetts. Call 800-327-5050. New York call 877-8 Hope NY. Maryland. Visit mdgamblinghelp.org.

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