NEW YORK — Jalen Brunson was being picked on defensively by the Indiana Pacers and picked apart by pundits for his ball-dominant game as the New York Knicks returned home to Madison Square Garden on Thursday, one loss from having their best season in 25 years end with a whimper.
Brunson accepted the blame for the Knicks’ 3-1 series deficit in the Eastern Conference finals, claiming he had to be better, even if his teammates felt any criticism of their competitive and compact captain was ridiculous, unfair or both.
“He does so much for us, and we ask so much out of him every game, I’m never going to allow Cap to take all the blame,” Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns said. “We’re brothers. We’re family. Family and brothers never let someone take all the blame.”
For two days, Brunson had to hear his point guard counterpart, Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton, garner praise for an incredible triple-double in Game 4 that had some analysts escorting him to the front of the line as a future face of the NBA. If he felt any pressure to counter, or upstage, Haliburton, Brunson wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of acknowledging it. He is the type to say next to nothing, or just enough to tease.
Brunson speaks most effectively with his game. And with the Knicks’ season on the brink Thursday, Brunson scored a game-high 32 points with five rebounds and five assists to lead his team to a 111-94 victory and force a Game 6 on Saturday in Indianapolis.
“Our backs are against the wall,” Brunson said. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘I need to play better than him.’ I was just thinking, ‘I need to help my team win.’ That’s my mindset every time I’m on the court.”
The win extended the Knicks’ life this postseason, and it meant Spike Lee’s orange zoot suit with blue pinstripes wasn’t going to be associated with bad memories. It gave their passionate fans reason to puff out their chests and shout, “Knicks in seven,” for the final minute of a game in which their team never trailed.
With each pull-up three-pointer or step-back fadeaway, Brunson silenced — for at least one day — those who questioned whether his probing, deliberate, dribbling style of play could be effective this late in the postseason. He also let his former coach from his early days with the Dallas Mavericks, the Pacers’ Rick Carlisle, see how he could respond to being hunted on pick and rolls by flipping the weapon back, like Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer.”
“That’s our guy,” Knicks forward Josh Hart said. “We don’t need him to be a lockdown defender or anything like that. We just need him to go out there and play physical, with intensity, and not foul. It’s really just a competitive thing, an ego thing, of, like, ‘Okay, I’m going to guard my yard.’ It’s having pride. I think he did that.”
Brunson made some history, joining Michael Jordan, LeBron James and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as the only players to have 10 games with at least 30 points and five assists in the same postseason. Gilgeous-Alexander, the newly crowned league MVP, has already used his run to lead Oklahoma City to its first NBA Finals trip in 13 years. He is still waiting to see whether his opponent will be Haliburton or Brunson.
The Knicks aren’t done because Brunson wasn’t alone. Towns was listed as questionable before Game 5 after knocking knees with Indiana’s Aaron Nesmith in the closing minutes of Game 4. The only question Towns had when he woke up Thursday was how, not whether, he was going to play.
“I looked at the game and it said, ‘Game 5 do-or-die,’” he said. “That was pretty much all I needed to see.”
And for a franchise that spent nearly two decades in a previous generation watching Patrick Ewing give his all on compromised knees, Towns was aggressive from the start, taking downhill drives to the basket that had Pacers defenders dropping like bowling pins. Indiana reserve Bennedict Mathurin tried to prevent Towns from scoring on one baseline charge to the hoop late in the fourth quarter, only to end up on his backside, looking up as Towns flexed and preened, rolling his shoulders as if he were shedding his troubles away.
Towns finished with 24 points and 13 rebounds, and he and Brunson became the first duo since Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant in 2002 to each score at least 20 points in the first five games of a conference finals series.
Mitchell Robinson, in his third game since replacing Hart in the Knicks’ starting lineup, had a relatively pedestrian stat line (six points and six rebounds), but he had a 35-second stretch in the second quarter during which he sent a Haliburton layup attempt flying into the stands, forced a turnover and had a tip-in. And Knicks Coach Tom Thibodeau’s decision to expand his rotation to include Delon Wright and Landry Shamet, necessitated by the Pacers’ relentless tempo, worked out so well that Shamet was serenaded by the sellout crowd after forcing a turnover and left the game to a standing ovation.
“This team’s special,” Towns said. “With this series, we haven’t been able to close out games the way we want to. We’ve had moments of brilliance. When we’re locked in, playing 48 minutes, we can show the world how special we really are.”
The Knicks played their best defensive game since their 38-point closeout against the defending champion Boston Celtics in the conference semifinals. After Haliburton’s historic 32-point, 15-assist, 12-rebound, zero-turnover performance in the previous game, the star guard was quieted by the sustained effort of Brunson and the on-ball pressure from Mikal Bridges that limited Haliburton to just eight points and six assists. The same player who already hit the Garden crowd with a Reggie Miller choke gesture after the Knicks blew a 17-point fourth-quarter lead in an overtime loss in Game 1 left the floor with an uncomfortable grin as the Pacers’ six-game road winning streak came to an end.
“Kudos to them. They played better than us,” Haliburton said. “We’ve got to be prepared for the next game.”
Desperation brought out the Knicks’ best performance of the series and at least left open the opportunity to become the first team in franchise history to come back from down 3-1 to win a series; the previous 15 teams to face that deficit all failed.
An opening to the Knicks’ first Finals trip since 1999 was created when Celtics star Jayson Tatum ruptured his Achilles’ and the Pacers eliminated the 64-win Cleveland Cavaliers, giving New York home-court advantage in this round. The Knicks failed to protect it with two home losses that could have gone either way. To ensure Thursday wasn’t the last night of the season at the Garden, they’ll need to win another game on the road, where they’ve gone 6-2 in the playoffs. And they’ll need Brunson to keep being Brunson — saying little, shooting a little more and settling scores.
“That’s something that Cap always does,” Towns said. “He answers the call every time.”
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