Knicks-Pacers lookahead: Tyrese Haliburton can cause PROBLEMS for Jalen Brunson & Karl-Anthony Towns

Knicks-Pacers lookahead: Tyrese Haliburton can cause PROBLEMS for Jalen Brunson & Karl-Anthony Towns

What’s up, guys? Thanks as always for supporting the show. It would mean a lot to me if you would take a second to scroll down and hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss any more of our videos. Also, make sure you follow us all over social media so you don’t miss any of our content or show announcements. Now, let’s split this up here. We’re going to talk about looking forward to the Pacers matchup first and then we’ll talk about the Celtics moving forward with their future. So, specifically with the Pacers matchup, I’m going to say this the same way that I’ve been saying it with some other series around when we’ve discussed the reality of going matchup to matchup. As we’ve now seen, two of the three 60- win teams in the NBA this year lose and as Oklahoma City is at risk of potentially losing on Sunday. Although we did get a report today that Aaron Gordon, there was that weird play where JDub dove into his legs and I thought he was just kind of playing up the injury to try to get, you know, a flagrant foul or something like that or a review. But looks like Aaron Gordon might have some sort of hamstring issue, which is very scary for a a Nuggets team that I would argue Aaron Gordon’s been their second best player in this postseason run. And so that obviously is a devastating loss there. But there’s a chance that we could end up losing all 60 win teams before we even get out of the second round. And part of the reason for that is because more and more as the game has changed, there are just so many different ways to play and so many different types of teams and so many different types of stars. Even if you just look at the remaining four stars that will be leading these groups, let’s say if Jokic advances or Sheay advances, right? I’ve got Tyrese Hallebertton who’s like some weird like Steve Nash mixed with a better athlete type of hybrid modern spread pick and roll like uh keep the ball moving type of ball handler. Then I’ve got Jaylen Brunson who’s like this small shifty like incredibly gifted halfcourt surgical scorershotmaker. Then I go out to the west and it’s like I get Anthony Edwards who’s like the modern version of Michael Jordan, just this huge apex athlete two guard that can shoot the out of the basketball. And then out of the other series, we’re either going to get like the modern-day James Harden, this high volume scorer that is incredibly gifted at getting to the foul line, but has another layer of versatility in terms of his mid-range shotmaking that that even James Harden didn’t have. or the best player in the world, Nicole Joic, who’s like this big doughy center who inverts your spacing and makes just about every damn shot he takes and is probably the best passer in the game. And as you kind of zoom out and look at that, that’s just these four or five remaining teams. If I if I went down the list for all 16 teams or all 20 if you included the playin teams, there’s just so many different kinds of stars and so many different kinds of role players and schemes on defense and on offense. We’ve seen more zone I feel like in this postseason than in any postseason that I can remember as so many teams have been working on mixing up coverages and different kinds of zone and entire halves where a team will run 20 25 possessions of zone. Like this is a a a modern NBA where every series is different and arguably within the game within the actual series themselves every game is different. And so it is no longer about which team won more games or who had the best net rating. It’s strictly about what do you have in your toolbox to manage the shifting flow of each series. So for instance, the Celtics, they move the ball, especially when they get into their matchup attacking and you either leave a opening in your coverage or if you like in game five just concede a lot of like size mismatches that they can bully right to the front of the rim. but they don’t come close to the pace and ball and player movement that Indiana brings to the table. So, similarly to what we saw with Minnesota where it like legitimately took them a lot longer than you would have expected to put away a Golden State Warriors team without Steph. And I mean, obviously they won the series in five games, but within those games it’s like they lose game one, game two, they blow them out, but game three they’re like trailing in the fourth quarter. Game four it’s uh the Warriors I think had a lead in the mid3 quarter. like it took that they didn’t dominate that team despite the massive talent advantage because of the fact that there were some realities to the way that Golden State just played a very different kind of basketball than the Lakers did and it just took them a while to adjust to it. And so with the Pacers, there are these obvious differences switching like you did against Boston that stagnated Boston, especially in game four and especially down the stretch of game one and game two. No matter what you do to Indiana, they are not going to stagnate. They are going to attack with ball and player movement. And if you do everything right, then yeah, they’ll go hunting a mismatch, but one, they’re going to try to get something easy by getting you to make a mistake, botching a switch or leaving an opening otherwise not there. And two, unlike Boston, Boston will hunt mismatches, but they can get away from it. That’s been the the story with Boston for years, even even going back to before they won the title. They have had a tendency to have extended stretches where they play a certain way and have a great deal of success and then they go brain dead for like 12 minutes of real time where they just take a bunch of bad shots and fail to go back to the thing that worked. Indiana’s pretty relentless about hunting those mismatches. If you switch appropriately and avoid the openings that naturally occur in their offense, they will throw it to Seakum or Miles Turner against a size mismatch over and over and over again. If you end up switching, if you end up containing the ball, they have a process offensively that is relentless from the start. They pick you up full court. They try to rush you into uh poor offense. They push in transition like crazy. Tyrese is one of the best kick-head passers in the NBA right now. They’re going to get you in the blender and if you survive the blender, they’re going to hunt a mismatch. This is a very, very different type of series than what the Celtics series is. And it’s a much better version of Tyrese Hallebertton. Tyresese Hallebertton is playing at a substantially higher level than he was playing for the Knicks series last year. Is his matchup specifically with uh Carl Anthony Towns in space, whether it be in pick and roll coverages like a high drop or a hedge or it be in a switch. That’s going to be a key factor in the series. Tyrese Hallebertton attacking Carl Anthony Towns in space. It’s going to be a a challenge. I I I expect to see a lot of Pascal Seakim and Miles Turner in postup mismatches against Jaylen Brunson as they work through, you know, maybe a Nemhard a ball screen with Nemhard or N Smith and they get a switch and they’re just going to throw it down there. There’s a a great deal of like trusting of simple closeout reads. Like the Celtics when they have Tatum dancing at the top of the key and two guys are digging down into the driving lanes, the Celtics are less willing to just take that like simple swing pass. The Pacers make that relentlessly. They make it like every time you sink off of a man for whatever reason, Tyrese will hit you every single time. And so it’s just going to be a very different type of challenge. And I think that bodess well for Indiana, especially early in the series. And so with the Knicks having homecourt advantage, I think it’s going to be really interesting to see if they can hold up in those first two games because when you play a very different team and they roll up into your arena and they’re playing great basketball and they throw you in the blender, you make a few too many mistakes in game one, suddenly even though you can solve that problem, you end up losing homecourt advantage in the process. And so I think that’s going to be the first thing I’m watching early in the series is just how quickly the Knicks adjust defensively to what will be a very different challenge against the Celtics. It was about switching and containing and the individual defense in game one and game two of Brunson on Tatum and Brown and in game four of Carl Anthony Towns on Jason Tatum in space. This series is going to be less of that and more of the attentiveness. We saw the job that the Knicks did in transition defense in game five against Boston. If they bring that type of effort, the Pacers will beat the out of them. And so again, like we talked earlier, this is going to be much more of a mental challenge for the Knicks than it is a physical challenge. I’m very, very excited for it. On the other end of the floor, we saw some stuff last year, right? Brunson had a great deal of success against Nemhard, not so much against Nesmith. We’ll see if Ric Carllo ends up making that kind of move. But here’s the thing. you end up putting a Nemhard on a male Bridges, you’re now conceding a lot of size in that matchup where Male Bridges has been a very gifted over-the-top shooter in the mid-range. And so, it’s very different type of team for the Pacers to match up with this time around. Uh, I’ve already started watching film on this series. Weirdly enough, the one game where everybody kind of played was in that early phase of the season when the Pacers weren’t playing very good basketball. Um, but we do have three games worth of data. The Knicks were two- one in the regular season. I’m going to be watching a lot of that film tomorrow and working on that series preview. It’ll be up on our feeds most likely Sunday morning, potentially Saturday afternoon. We’ll let you guys know when it comes out. I’ll text or I’ll put it out on Twitter and you guys can see it there, but we’ll have an in-depth series preview at some point in the next day or two.

Jason breaks down the New York Knicks dispatching the Boston Celtics and then gives his early thoughts on the Eastern Conference Finals between the Knicks and the Indiana Pacers. He breaks down the matchup between Tyrese Haliburton and Jalen Brunson + the problems Indiana can cause for Karl-Anthony Towns.

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