Jalen Brunson left the floor at Madison Square Garden carrying a 38-point box score, a five-rebound, six-assist line, a 15-for-29 shooting night and a Knicks team that had just completed the second-largest fourth-quarter comeback in NBA playoff history. He walked into the postgame podium and was asked, by Ernie Johnson and again by reporters at the Garden, to explain what had happened in the final seven and a half minutes. He did not pretend to know.
"I still don't," Brunson said. "But I think the common denominator was just us still believing in each other and still playing, still fighting. Just chipping away. We knew we weren't going to get it all back in one possession, so we tried to give them stops. We kept running. Got a couple lucky shots to go in, but we just kept fighting."
Down 93-71 with eleven and a half minutes to play, the Knicks closed the game on a 44-11 run. Brunson scored 13 of New York's first 18 points in that surge and never let the Cavaliers get clean breath again. The mechanism, in plain language, was Brunson dragging James Harden into pick-and-roll and refusing to surrender the matchup.
"Honestly, it was the ball was going in," Brunson said when asked about hunting Harden. "So I honestly just was trying to get to my spot and trying to make plays. If someone came over, I was going to find someone else. But I was just trying to get to my spot and trust my work."
Mike Brown, the Knicks' head coach, was even more direct in his own session. The matchup hunt had been discussed by his staff that morning. Once Cleveland tried to do the same to Brunson on the other end, Brown let his star feast.
"Sometimes you got to do what the game dictates, and they were trying to do the same thing with Jaylen," Brown said. "And so we said, okay, you know, we feel like we could play that game. We try not to play that game much, but we feel like we have a guy that we can play that game with. Just like we have to try to figure out different ways to guard Harden and Mitchell, they got to figure out different ways to guard Jaylen, but — there is no secret — we were attacking Harden."
Brunson's process language for the comeback returned to the same word he used in the huddle.
"Just keep fighting, keep chipping away," he said. "We're not going to get it back in one possession. Most importantly, sticking together. No matter how that game finished, habits translate, and so they translate to the next game. So just finishing the game strong regardless of whatever is going on, making sure we're having the right habits. So when we go the next game, we're doing what we just were doing. We don't want to give up ever, and so just having faith in each other."
The leadership huddle, captured in TV cuts during the third quarter when New York's deficit was at its worst, drew its own question. Brown was asked what Brunson had been saying.
"He's our guy, and he felt we need to play faster," Brown said. "He felt we needed to be better defensively. There were a couple of things that he felt, and he made sure that we knew, and our guys responded to him."
Brunson's praise after the win pointed in two specific directions. He singled out Landry Shamet, who Mike Brown brought into the rotation nine minutes from the buzzer and who finished with timely threes and a hard close on Donovan Mitchell. And he singled out Mikal Bridges, who hit two of the heaviest threes of the comeback and shut down the wings in overtime.
"He played big time," Brunson said of Shamet. "That's just who he is. He's a true professional ever since he's walked into the league. He's up to any task that you put in front of him. He's just been that player for us, and we have the utmost faith in him."
Game 2 is Thursday at Madison Square Garden. Brunson left the podium still unable to fully explain what he had just done. He had not yet decided that mattered.
