Mike Brown Went Outside The Box To Finish Off Philly. It Was Needed

The Knicks led by 17 points with just over eight minutes to go on Saturday against the Philadelphia 76ers. After a choppy first half that saw the Knicks get dominated by Joel Embiid and allow the Sixers to shoot 65% from the field, the Knicks had dominated the first 16 minutes of the second half and had all but salted the game away.

Karl-Anthony Towns had barely played due to early foul trouble, and the team had been forced to go to Ariel Hukporti in a key spot in the fourth quarter. Still, all the correct buttons were being pressed for the Knicks… until it didn’t.

As the team has done so many times in the month of January, the offense ground to a halt after a Hukporti’s layup with 8:17 left. The Sixers would score 12 straight points and cut the deficit to five before the next Knicks’ basket over three and a half minutes later. Over a span of 6:20, they scored just four total points and went 1-for-14 from the field and 1-for-4 from the foul line, a truly disgusting effort to nearly piss away a big win.

Yet, they held on. They held on despite some of the worst clutch basketball you’ve ever seen, missing half their free throws, and some ill-advised decisions. Part of that was the simple fact that a lot has to go right to overcome such a deficit in so little time, but the other part was an important lineup switch made by Mike Brown, whose seat had become unexpectedly hot after the team’s disastrous start to the month.

Towns fouled out in just 16 minutes with 5:24 left. It was another bleh game for him, which is a story for another day. Brown inserted Mitchell Robinson in the game, who was a team-best plus-14 in the game and was an integral part of the team’s massive third quarter by shutting down Embiid and demolishing Philly on the boards. The decision to ride Robinson past his likely minutes limit was a big one on its own.

But Robinson had already logged over 25 minutes, a minute off his season high. If he closed the game, he would be over 30 minutes for the first time since April 11 of last season and just the third time since the December 2023 stress fracture in his ankle seemed to permanently put him on a minutes restriction. As such, Robinson only spent 86 seconds in the game before being lifted for…

Deuce McBride. Not Hukporti or Mikal Bridges, it was McBride.

Despite facing a full-throttle and healthy Embiid, Mike Brown elected to go to a bold small-ball lineup, keeping Bridges on the bench to run out a never-before-seen Brunson-McBride-Shamet-Hart-Anunoby lineup. OG Anunoby has very rarely played a small-ball 5 as a Knick and this was a bold way to use it.

Did the lineup do well? Not really, the Sixers outscored the Knicks the rest of the way. What the lineup did, however, was take Embiid out of the rhythm he was gaining to start the Sixers’ run. The former MVP had scored eight of his team’s last 11 during this run and would only manage one putback layup the rest of the game.

Anunoby’s strength is his strength. He lacks the speed to stick a guy like Tyrese Maxey or De’Aaron Fox or any small, shifty guard, but makes his money by being able to use his strength to stonewall players who use their physicality to get points. Embiid is one of those, especially when he’s on.

They also didn’t lose anything on the boards. Grabbing rebounds isn’t always about having the bigger or savvier center, but about effort. This ludicrous standing putback dunk was a big part of holding off the Sixers.

One of the reasons the Knicks made the change from Tom Thibodeau to Mike Brown is lineup versatility. There haven’t been the revolutionary five-out spacing lineups that people envisioned (Brown has reverted to a Thibs classic to start most games), but there have been occasional lineups and adjustments that are necessary over the course of an NBA season that make you think “This is why they made the change they made.”

He passed a big test on Saturday. There are undoubtedly more to come.