What’s wrong with the Knicks’ defense?

Once their calling card under Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks’ defense has waned this season as their offense has exploded. What has afflicted the Knicks’ once-vaunted D so far this season?

The 2021-22 New York Knicks are unrecognizable from last season’s plucky playoff team, seemingly dazzled by their own offensive beauty, at the expense of mundane defensive necessities that were non-negotiable not so long ago. Like someone who has won the lottery and decided they no longer need to shower, they’ve started the season as a strangely inverted version of their former selves. Sitting at a healthy, if flattering, 5-2, with the second-best offense in the league, per Cleaning the Glass, they boast an attack whose sparkle and splash has so far only been dampened by the worrying stink of their 20th-ranked defense.

The smelliest parts of this early-season defensive funk are excessive fouling and poor transition defense. The Knicks rank 27th in opponent free throw rate, and 25th in opponent transition efficiency, per CTG, through seven games. 

A high foul rate doesn't necessarily doom a defense if the fouling is a result of a deliberate aggressiveness that forces turnovers to offset the free throws surrendered, but for the Knicks, their hacking has been more symptom than strategy. Struggles in defensive transition can also be partly explained as an acceptable byproduct of an offensive shot profile suddenly dominated by 3-pointers, with long rebounds acting as a launch pad for opponents to attack before defenders get back — but the Knicks’ problems in transition run far deeper than this predictable and built-in vulnerability. 

The problems start with the basics: if the first rule of transition offense is to sprint the floor, the first rule of transition defense is to do exactly the same.

Look at Julius Randle jog back into the play here, twice, showing zero urgency to limit the damage of his own mistakes after turning the ball over. The Knicks’ best player, per NBA Tracking Data, has the slowest average defensive speed on the entire roster — slower even than the 280-pound Mitchell Robinson and the 36-year-old Taj Gibson. Interestingly, he was the Knicks’ slowest defender last season, too, so maybe this is nothing but a crude metric to confirm the early season eye-test. Or maybe it just slipped under the feel-good radar last season. Whether it’s a new problem or an old problem suddenly magnified: it’s as subtle this season as being poked in the eye with a baseball bat.

Does his offensive burden excuse this defensive energy conservation a little? Probably. Maybe. A little. But at times this season his indifferent effort has been painful to watch. 

It's not just Julius, though.

Here’s Evan Fournier complaining to the refs rather than getting back, and Robinson getting flat-out beat down the floor by Mo Bamba. Effort isn’t the only issue in these plays, of course. Execution is sorely lacking, too.

In the first play, Kemba is slow to get up, and moans to the referee rather than slow down the ball, leaving Fournier to sprint across the court and try to pick up his man. He can’t get there in time — but it’s not Fournier’s individual error, rather a failure of Randle and Mitch, both back and in the middle of the floor, to rotate to Fournier’s man earlier and balance the floor in what is essentially a temporary safety blanket of a zone. In transition, every offensive player is every defensive player’s responsibility until the initial advantage is neutralized: especially the player with the ball. There is no “Fournier’s man.” The same problem is obvious in the second clip, and this time it’s Kemba who’s preoccupied with his matchup rather than walling-up in the paint, leaving RJ Barrett on an island at the rim.

Sometimes there is just a collective inability to stop or impact the ball at all, with players waltzing through the Knick defense like it’s a bead curtain.

If you let NBA players dribble 94 feet without ensuring they see multiple defensive bodies — sat in a stance and walled-up to protect the paint — they will take the layups and free throws you generously lay out on a red carpet for them.

The mistakes are momentary and minute, but snowball over the course of a game, and can torpedo whole defensive possessions before they begin.

Off the inbounds, Fournier ICEs (forces to the sideline) rather than ducks under a ball screen set for non-shooter DeMar DeRozan way up on the floor, almost at the logo, and gets hit with a step-up screen (a common counter to ICE coverage) that leaves Mitch up fecal creek. Immanuel Quickley gambles for the steal deep in the backcourt and never recovers. Alec Burks takes a terrible shot and then back-peddles rather than sprints back to the paint and gives up the layup, and then the foul for good measure.

Just a few examples from an embarrassingly large buffet of early-clock blunders through seven games.

These clips all feature poor transition defense that is then compounded by fouls: a nightmarish blending of the Knicks’ two biggest defensive issues. While this last-ditch fouling does need to be cleaned up, the teams’ 27th-ranked opponent free throw rate is mitigated slightly and partly explained by: 1) being a function of an aggressive help scheme by Tom Thibodeau that is inherently physical (counterpoint to my own counterpoint: the Knicks were a healthy 15th in the stat last year, indicative of the difference between consistent disruptive activity and consistently having to cover for errors), and 2) facing some bruising big man foul magnets early on in the schedule — guys like Joel Embiid and Jonas Valanciunas. 

One area that is exacerbating the team’s foul problems, though, is an over-reliance on the popular-as-piles Euro take foul. As Mike Breen often gripes on the broadcast, there is a time and a place where it's a good foul, but the Knicks seem to be overly reliant on it, which could be hurting their transition fundamentals.

It hurts the player taking the foul positionally by encouraging a habit of meeting the ball at or before half-court rather than getting back into the paint; it hurts the rest of the team by de-emphasising the importance of hauling ass to get back and defend; and it hurts the team late in quarters and games by landing them in the penalty earlier than necessary. 

Predictably, it all came to a head in the Knicks’ latest loss against the Toronto Raptors — a team who strategically defend with a targeted aggression specifically to manufacture transition possessions — who must have been salivating at the Knicks’ inability to hold the likes of the Orlando Magic and the New Orleans Pelicans in check on the break.

It was messy. The Raptors gorged on the soft-bellied Knicks. Behind their asphyxiating perimeter defense, they forced Knick turnovers on 17.7% of their possessions. When the Knicks did manage to get a shot off, and missed, the Raptors turned a mammoth 37.1% of these live-rebound possessions into a transition opportunity. Nick Nurse’s team didn’t so much target the Knicks’ Achilles heel as reveal the Knicks’ gangrenous leg. It worked. The good guys lost, 113-104, and despite shooting a scorching 42% from deep, they couldn’t stop the defensive rot that had been ominously festering since the first day of the season.

The good news is, this is the best early-season bad news Knicks fans have had in a decade, and it benefits from that perspective. That being said, on one hand, none of this is terminal — these problems are problems of effort and execution and so are inherently correctable. But on the other hand, if they’re so correctable, then they should be trending in the right direction by now.

Expectations and week-sized samples are a potent narrative cocktail for overreactions, but through seven games, the only thing stopping the Knicks being a really good team, is that the Knicks seem to have forgotten what made them plain old good to begin with: a collective dedication to defensive details in the form of some Thibodeau-trademarked defensive hygiene. They need to clean up their act, and they need to do it in the high-stakes seams between a ferocious offense and a so-far flaccid defense.