NEW YORK — Through four games of their opening-round series with the New York Knicks, the Atlanta Hawks had succeeded in making life difficult for Jalen Brunson. A team-wide effort helmed by on-ball menaces Dyson Daniels and Nickeil Alexander-Walker had helped limit the All-NBA point guard to just 43% shooting inside the 3-point arc, with 14 turnovers mitigating his 21 assists.
The struggle to pop Brunson loose led the Knicks toreorient their offense in Game 4, running possessions through Karl-Anthony Towns and prominently featuring OG Anunoby — an approach that worked, but one necessitated by Atlanta selling out on Brunson.
“He can beat you so many ways,” Hawks head coach Quin Snyder said before Game 5. “You know, we'll keep putting different guys on him, changing matchups, trying to do anything you can to just make it hard on him [...] It's not easy.”
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On Tuesday, Brunson offered a reminder of exactly why that is.
Snyder opened Game 5 by juggling Atlanta’s defensive assignments, cross-matching Daniels onto Towns to try to interrupt the flow he found as a high-post hub in Game 4. That slid Alexander-Walker over to Brunson, and while the newly minted Most Improved Player did his level best — and while Daniels still saw his fair share of time in the matchup — Brunson proceeded to shake loose and put together his most composed, decisive, explosive and overwhelming performance of the series.
"Played well. Made shots,” Alexander-Walker said of Brunson’s play on Tuesday. “Gotta be better in his pick-and-roll coverage. Had a few lanes where he was able to get in the paint, get a half a step. Guys like him, that's all that they need."
The Hawks gave Brunson a half-step, and he took a mile, scoring a game-high 39 points on 15-for-23 shooting with 8 assists and just 1 turnover in 35 minutes of work — “a big game from a big-time player,” as Knicks head coach Mike Brown described it after the game — in an emphatic126-97 win, a near-wire-to-wire victory in which the Hawks’ last lead came when a Daniels tip-in made it … 4-2, with 10:39 to go in the first quarter.
