Knicks 121, Magic 96: “The Knicks are doing what they should be doing to this team folks, pulverizing them”

The Knicks went up against a vastly inferior team in their second game of the season, and as they should have, they won in grand fashion — besting the Orlando Magic by 25 and breaking the franchise record for 3-pointers made.

The New York Knicks arrived to work against the Orlando Magic yesterday looking to start the season 2-0 for the first time in nine years. They grabbed a coffee, sat down, and checked some emails. The offense leaned back, stretched a little, and flexed its various muscles. The defense cracked its knuckles, ready for another day at the NBA office. Something’s sitting in the inbox. From rookie Jalen Suggs and rookie head coach Jamahl Mosley and the rest of the rebuilding Magic. 

“Subject: Mo Bamba pick-and-pop threes. Wendell Carter Jr. guarding Julius Randle. Two rookies in a starting lineup with a combined age of 14-and-a-half.”

The Knicks didn’t even respond, marking that shit as spam not worthy of the effort it takes to type, and dispatching the Magic by the end of the first quarter. The score was 16-13 Knicks with 6:58 to go in the first, and at the end of the frame had ballooned to 36-16. Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks were back home before their first coffee of the day was cold.

It finished 121-96, but had a fork in it long before that, the lead lazily floating between no less than 16 and no more than 34 for the rest of the night. 

Records tumbled: the Knicks knocked down 24 3-pointers (a franchise record) on 54 long-range attempts (a franchise record). The offense hummed and purred. Seven Knicks scored in double figures: paced by Randle (21), Fournier (18), and Immanuel Quickley (16). The ball zipped to the tune of 34 assists as a team, the most since Feb. 10, 2017. Three Knicks finished with seven assists: Randle again, Derrick Rose, and Alec Burks. Four Knicks finished with four or more made triples: Fournier (4-9), Rose (4-6), Quickley (4-8), and Burks (4-7).

“Take their heart,” the inimitable Walt “Clyde” Frazier, newly re-minted as one of the 75 best players in NBA history, said, at some point. Which is easier said than done against a team that barely has an NBA pulse. But the Knicks took what was there to be taken. The Magic had no answer for Randle, who picked out shooters all night long like he was perusing a menu of gourmet perimeter desserts. 

Four magic help defenders had feet in the paint on the first possession of the game, a Randle isolation. Fournier spots this and sets a smart back screen on Cole Anthony to free up Kemba, who calmly knocks the first of many down. If teams have no individual matchup for Julius this season — and there aren’t many who do — it will continue to rain threes as long as Randle makes the right read.

Speaking of Kemba bombing threes:

This horns set, with two high ball-screens for Kemba to chose from, one from an elite lob threat like Mitchell Robinson, and one by an elite shooter like Randle, with snipers like RJ Barrett and Fournier camped in the corners, is a nightmare to defend. Play a deep-drop like Bamba does here, and Kemba will pull from three. Step up on Kemba and you give Mitch a runway. Step up on Kemba and tag Mitch and you give up a catch-and-shoot three to Randle. Over-rotate onto Randle at the top from a corner shooter and you’re toast.

We didn’t see it against the Celtics as much because they didn’t play traditional pick-and-roll defense, opting to switch everything. But Kemba can still do it, and this will be a Thibs staple all year.

“The Magic’s defense is pathetic,” Clyde said at some point. And it was, routinely picked apart by the fast-blossoming Fournier-Randle two-man game, until Mosley and the Magic found some tentative momentum in the 3rd quarter playing a zone. The Knicks came out in the fourth quarter and quickly shot them out of it.

By consistently overloading one side of the zone, and having four or even all five Knicks as a threat to shoot, New York bent and then broke the Magic’s zone — which in concept was no different to the zones that consistently befuddled the Knicks’ offense so much last year. The shooting depth of this roster will do this to zones, which shouldn’t be such an effective plan B for opposing coaches this season. Thibs even unleashed this funky inverted horns set to kick off the fourth quarter, which led to the Obi triple in the first clip above, by momentarily putting two Magic defenders on the ball, forcing a rotation that moves the trio of perimeter defenders over one spot towards the right wing, towards a cardboard cut-out of Terrence Ross, and maybe — if you look closely — breaking poor Terrence’s brain.

Speaking of Mr. Ross, the infamous Knick-killing bucket-microwave, he did in fact threaten the dreaded percolation, hitting a few shots in a row. But these Knicks aren’t those Knicks, and Terrence Ross’ rumblings aren’t the code reds they used to be. 

“It has the ambience of a preseason game,” Clyde said, at some point. And it did, because after the scariest moment of the scrimmage, when Robinson went down clutching his hamstring and subsequently left the game, Thibs in the most extreme Everything-Matters-Even-When-You’re-Up-By-Twenty-Five of Thibsy moments, brought Mitch back in after only a couple of minutes on the bench. He looked OK, thankfully, but the question remains: why, Thibs — you psychotic magician — do you need to risk him not looking OK for the sake of defending Mo Wagner? I’m not a doctor, and wasn’t in the timeout, and defer to the judgment of the man that was, but the thought of Mitch getting hurt again is genuinely petrifying.

This wasn’t the only Trademarked Thibs Moment. He laid into Obi — who again was a breath of very fast-moving fresh air all evening — for some lackadaisical defensive rebounding deep into garbage time. He left Randle in until Randle got clobbered with a dangerous flagrant foul with 4:30 remaining, a foul committed by a team who had already lost but been told to compete like they could still win, a foul that prompted even Laid-Back Tom to sit his superstar down for the night. To all these faux controversies I say: Thibs will forever do Thibs, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“The Knicks are doing what they should be doing to this team folks, pulverizing them,” Clyde said, towards the end. And as Clyde so often is, he was right. This was a classic-if-unfamiliar case of good team meets bad team. Lion meets mouse. Half-interested hand meets overly-enthusiastic bug. The two teams were separated by a few large planets’ worth of talent, and will face each other again on Sunday night at Madison Square Garden with the same outcome the most likely one, but it’s tough to blow out the same team twice in a row in the NBA. There is a psychological leveling that usually happens in the second game of a home-and-home.

The Knicks took care of business last night, and should do again on Sunday, but maybe the Magic will make them work a bit harder back in the Garden, make them stick around for a second cup of coffee. Magic fans will have it tough this year, faced with a nightly battle against the realities of a roster full of hazy ideas, forced to hunker down for 82 relentless games at a talent deficit, keeping just warm enough in a survival blanket of hope and lottery luck and college YouTube highlights. 

Ah sweet rebuilding oblivion, Knicks fans know this pain all too well. Which is why they’re losing their collective shit in viral spasms of victory, and why business-as-usual pulverizations feel a little strange: but damn it, they feel oh so good, too. 

The Knicks are on their first winning streak to start a season in nine years. Enjoy it, savor it, celebrate the novelty of the expectation of it: of being a good team and doing what good teams are supposed to do.