Jalen Brunson shot his way to a 40-point night Monday at Madison Square Garden, rallying the Knicks past the new-look Nets. AP Photo by Jessie Alcheh
While the suddenly superstar-less Nets tried to adjust to their reshaped roster, Jalen Brunson and the Knicks had a ball at Brooklyn’s expense.
Brunson scored 40 points, including six 3-pointers, and New York used a big second half to run away from the new-look Nets, 124-106, Monday night in front of a sellout crowd of 19,812 fans at Madison Square Garden.
“He just really has a knack of getting to his shots,” Brooklyn head coach Jacque Vaughn said of Brunson, who went 15-of-21 from the floor, handed out five assists and blocked a shot as the Knicks ended a nine-game losing streak in the East River rivalry.
The Nets (33-24) went undefeated against the Knicks whenever Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving played, but now they’ve lost four of their last six games overall to slip into fifth place in the Eastern Conference playoff race.
With Durant in Phoenix and Irving in Dallas, Vaughn is working his way through an assortment of new players, each of whom is also adjusting to playing with new teammates.
“We are learning each other,” admitted Vaughn, who had Cam Johnson and fellow new additions Mikal Bridges and Dorian Finney-Smith in the starting lineup alongside Spencer Dinwiddie and Nic Claxton. “We’ll use (Tuesday’s practice) to get used to each other.”
Brunson helped the seventh-place Knicks (32-27) pull within two games of Brooklyn, which doesn’t want to return to the NBA’s play-in tournament featuring the No. 7-10 seeds.
“You’ve got to give them credit. They’ve been really good the past couple of years and they were great tonight,” Brunson said of New York’s losing streak in the rivalry.
“But I think we just had the upper hand in the second…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply