Karl-Anthony Towns saves the Knicks season with the best moment of the playoffs of his career
It's never easy with the cities of Karl-Anthony, isn't it? Each breakthrough comes with a step back. He appears as an All-Star in Minnesota, but the team collapsed following the debacle of Jimmy Butler. He defends Nikola Jokić on the way to the largest victory in the eliminatory series in the history of Timberwolves. He proceeded to the Minnesota shooting of the first three games of the Western Conference final against the Dallas Mavericks. He scores 35 points in match 1 for the Knicks in the Eastern Conference finals this season. He also mercilessly obtained the hunt for Switch by Tyrese Haliburton in defense and a bench for long sections of match 2.
This is the experience of cities in a word. The good is so enticing that you suffer through a little trouble. And, do not be mistaken, there was a lot of trouble for the first three quarters of match 3 on Sunday. The key number here was four: the number of reversals, faults and points that he had accumulated in the 75% of the game. The reversals and the faults were unhappy in his history of the playoffs. He has an average of almost four faults per game in his career in the playoffs. Fortunately, he reduced the turnover, but during his first three laps on the eliminatory carousel, he accumulated 57 in 16 games.
You live with these drawbacks in the hope of being able to mark as he did in the match 1. When he does, despite the unhappy end of this defeat, it is worth it. When he doesn't do it, well, let's say that things started to go to the dark in the mid-game of the game 3 on Sunday on the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference final. The Knicks started, after all, another center next to him in match 3 in Mitchell Robinson.
Robinson was the more minus darling of the playoffs, and a much easier adjustment in the favorite identity of Tom Thibodeau's defense. Towns makes a super maximum salary. Knicks are heading for several years of luxury tax invoices and deck restrictions. If the Pacers had run from the ground in match 3, because it seemed that they would do it in the second quarter, questions about the place of cities in this team, less than a year after its acquisition, were going to emerge.
Obviously, this is not what happened. Brunson, who raised four faults in the first half, had trouble making big problems. Thibodeau, perhaps accidentally thanks to the same bad difficulty of evil endured by Deucce McBride, brought to light Delon Wright for a few critical minutes. When McBrid and Wright played together, New York's defense suddenly clicked. This left the offense entirely in the hands of cities. He delivered, fivefold his total points of the first three quarters with 20 in the final frame. A 10 -point deficit turned into a six -point victory.
To call it, the best eliminatory match for the cities career is unfair. He was terrible during three -quarters, and again, despite the loss, match 1 was four days ago, and his triumph over Jokić was more recent than his profession suggested it. It was certainly the best playoffs moment In his career, however, and this seems somewhat appropriate for a player whose determining line could be his inconsistency.
These are the moments you exchange from cities to be provided. You make it known that it will inevitably be games in which its defense makes it unplayable. You assume that he will have trouble with mistakes and that he will give the ball and even when he does not, his level of aggression goes and comes almost at random. It's exasperating. But when it's true, it's Nirvana. And Sunday was the ultimate.
It was not an effort at the team's scale to kill the best player in the world, because the Denver series was a year ago. Nor was it a wasted jewel like match 1. He was a masterpiece of the season, all or nothing, of a player who really needed it. This is the kind of moment that justifies the decision to exchange several key rotation players and a choice of first round not only to obtain it, but to pay for its huge contract.
I hope this is a moment on which he can rely. We have seen all the versions of Towns in this series: the shooter, the aggressor, the pacifist, the frustration check, the playmaker, the turnover machine, everything is in there. If Towns was the kind of player who could channel the property and block the bad bad, frankly, he would probably still play for Minnesota at the moment. The Knicks partially have it because of the roulette that he apparently runs a quarter per quarter.
But these are moments like this one that justify the Miss. The knicks died in the water. Their season was over. The Pacers were heading for the Nba Finals … until they are not. There remains a lot of basketball to play here. The Knicks have not even recovered the advantage of the field yet. But they will live to fight another day because of what the cities did in the fourth quarter on Sunday, and if all these turnover and faults and bad possessions in Haliburton are the price that the Knicks have to pay to obtain this, well, at least on Sunday, it was worth it.
