During the New York Knicks' Tuesday night victory over the Toronto Raptors, Mike Brown rolled out a lineup of Jalen Brunson, Jose Alvarado, Mohamed Diawara, OG Anunoby, and Mitchell Robinson for the first time all season. If JB has any say in the matter, it will not be the last time we see these five together.
This group’s inaugural voyage came in the first quarter. The stint lasted just two minutes and 18 seconds, after which the Knicks didn’t turn to the quintet again.
Abandoning it wasn’t necessarily a mistake. New York won, after all. But tabling this lineup also had nothing to do with the results. The fivesome outscored Toronto by eight points in a little over two minutes, all while flashing a nice mix of defensive hustle and disruption and a desire to play with pace.Â
This Knicks lineup is almost tailor made for Jalen Brunson
We needn’t have seen this group before to understand its potential. Surrounding Brunson with a bunch of defensive dogs will never be a bad idea.Â
In fact, you can make the case that a JB-Jose-Mo-OG-Mitch lineup comprises the Knicks’ four best defenders around their captain. This may not be a consensus opinion, particularly with the way Mikal Bridges is mucking up possessions away from the ball these days. At worst, then, this lineup dots Brunson with four of the team’s five most valuable defenders.Â
Leaning into that model could come with a trade-off on offense. This quintuple does not have a clear-cut second shot creator. Alvarado, Anunoby, and even Diawara can be fine with the ball in their hands. Not one of them is used to consistently generating offense for themselves when facing pressure.
Still, depending on the night, the same could be said for the team’s supporting cast. If the Knicks are sacrificing anything, it’s their three-point shooting. Unlike Karl-Anthony Towns, Robinson is a non-factor from the perimeter. Anunoby, Alvarado, and Diawara, meanwhile, are all downing less than 30 percent of their above-the-break triples.Â
Returning to this group is nevertheless worth the risk. Brunson is no stranger to working within tight half-court confines, and defenses are still inclined to close out on Anunoby and Alvarado no matter where they are behind the arc. The offense should grind out enough points, especially if Diawara continues to be lights out from the corners.Â
Mike Brown should value this lineup more over time
Giving more run to this lineup also serves to prepare Brown for Deuce McBride’s eventual return from a core muscle injury. With him, Brunson, and Alvarado all in the rotation, the Knicks won’t be able to avoid backcourt pairings featuring two small guards. They might as well flesh out the Brunson-Alvarado sample in the meantime.
The preliminary results back up the exploration. New York has outscored its opponents by 32 points, with an offensive rating of 121.1, in the 83 minutes Brunson and Alvarado have shared the court. The Knicks have benefited from some freezing-cold opponent three-point shooting during these stretches (25 percent), but Alvarado covers up nicely for JB on defense, and both are willing movers and shakers when they’re displaced from the ball.
This also just so happens to be the lineup best suited to papering over any rookie growing pains Diawara experiences. For all the concern about whether his efficiency from deep can hold, he has suffered lapses on the defensive end. Those will not hurt as much if he’s alongside both Robinson and Anunoby.
Small-sample theater doesn’t get much tinier this. None of us should be ready to draw sweeping conclusions from a short burst’s worth of dominance. But given Brown’s propensity for using the regular season to experiment, that short burst is all we need to hope this lineup sees the court again. Well that, and the abundance of defensive sense it makes for a team built around Jalen Brunson.