Jalen Brunson just laid the blueprint for playoff-proofing the Knicks' offense

The New York Knicks’ victory over the Boston Celtics Thursday night wasn’t just another notch for the win column. With the way Jalen Brunson picked apart the defense when a center guarded Josh Hart, it was also a roadmap to coating the offense in Teflon ahead of the postseason.

Anyone who has semi-occasionally watched the Knicks over the past two years understands the gravity of this (potential) development. Opponents putting centers on Hart has reliably neutralized the offensive attack time and time again, making life much harder on Karl-Anthony Towns and Brunson himself, while also undermining what scant chemistry the duo has forged. 

New York has made a concerted effort for weeks to increase the interplay between its two most important offensive players. But even when they’re acting off the same script, so much still tends to fall apart when defenses throw a big man on Hart. It has left plenty of room for doubt as the Knicks navigate their way toward the playoffs. 

And yet, as it turns out, New York may be finding ways to overcome its biggest problem.

Jalen Brunson knows how to bust up the centers-on-Josh Hart look

Two moments from the win over the Celtics stick out like OG Anunoby’s hand in a junior varsity team huddle. In the first one, Hart screened for Brunson after Boston put a big on him—a standard course of action for the Knicks when they’re faced with these looks. The end result, however, was anything but:

Not every defense will blitz Brunson as aggressively on these pick-and-roll possessions. At the same time, he’s a devastating enough scorer for it to regularly happen. Plus, if anything, the coverage here delayed his ability to see Hart on the roll. 

Either way, Brunson hitting Hart on his dive before he reaches the free-throw line is a huge deal. Generally delayed decision-making out of pick-and-rolls is among Knicks fans’ biggest gripes with their captain. Throwing this pass when he did, before the defense could recover, forces opponents to think twice about how they guard both Brunson and Hart. 

Granted, this isn’t enough to prevent teams from putting centers on Hart. But it can be when paired with moments like this: 

Forcing an off-ball switch, with Neemias Queta going from Hart to Towns, is a victory unto itself—and a further sign of Brunson’s value as a lead floor general. Parlaying that into another Brunson-KAT action? That’s priceless.

The Knicks’ approach against Boston can work at a larger scale

Many will be quick to point out that the Celtics didn’t have Jaylen Brown. He would have given Boston the ability to downsize, with higher-quality defenders, and complicate the Knicks’ offense even further. 

Still, when New York works this hard to get bigs back on Towns and run two-man actions with him and JB, it demands enemy head coaches to reconsider their approach at least to some extent. The chess match of it all gets even tougher for opponents when Hart is diving hard off screens, and JB is hitting him early. 

It gets harder still when Hart is hitting his threes, which he’s done for much of this season. He’s downed more than 40 percent of his triples for the year. Defenses will never treat him as a lights-out threat, but pairing his wide-open accuracy alongside Brunson’s determinedness to get KAT into more favorable matchups and spam screening actions with him, and you’ve got a version of the Knicks offense nobody in the Eastern Conference is hard-wired to stop.