Knicks coach Mike Brown called out Karl-Anthony Towns.
And Towns responded.
Pistons center Paul Reed, starting in place of the injured Jalen Duren, had 15 points and five rebounds at halftime of the Knicks’ 111-97 win over the Pistons on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden. He was winning his matchup against Towns.
Brown let Towns know at halftime.
“I just told him the truth,” Brown said. “ ‘KAT, the guy is killing us on the glass and when he gets a rebound, he’s putting it back. Or anything he gets in the paint, he’s putting it back. If he catches it on the perimeter, guard him.’ And he did those things. I gotta tip my hat off to KAT because I thought his shift in his mindset was really big for us in the second half.”
Towns finished with a game-high 27 points and 20 rebounds. He recorded 19 of those points and 11 of those rebounds in the second half. Reed, on the other hand, was a nonfactor in the second half. And he clearly grew frustrated, earning a flagrant-1 foul for elbowing Towns in the head while fighting for a rebound in the third quarter.
“I challenged KAT and KAT had a tremendous second half,” Brown said. “Twenty-seven and 20, he’s more than capable of doing that night in and night out.”
Brown experimented across the first three games with having both Jalen Brunson and Towns on the bench at the same time.
It delivered bad results, and Brown went away from that strategy on Tuesday.
“In Games 1 and 2, my big experimentation was playing KAT and Jalen in two stretches together,” Brown said. “And so the middle of [those games], I had both KAT and Jalen off the floor. We didn’t really do that last year. Watching it, I think we did it in the preseason some, but we didn’t play everybody all the time so it was a little harder, but watching it, I didn’t like it.”
Brown similarly experimented with having Josh Hart come off the bench to begin the season last year, alongside Mitchell Robinson. It wasn’t long until he reversed course, however.
“There’s some things that I’m looking at or messing with that may or may not stay the same,” Brown said. “That’s part of what you’re trying to do to figure out what’s best for your team long term. In the short term, it might not turn out good, like it didn’t turn out good not starting Josh, we took our lumps. But it was good to go through it last year. So, it’s something we’ll continue to try to figure out early on.”
