How do the Knicks bounce back from their historic collapse? Inside New York’s state of mind and strategy for Game 2

The first question — the one that dominated brainwaves and airwaves, tabloid back pages and possibly therapists’ billable hours all across the Tri-State area on Thursday — is obvious: How the hell did the Pacers just do that?

The second question — the one dominating Knicks fans’ every waking hour until tipoff of Game 2 on Friday night — might be even tougher to parse:

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How the hell does New York get over it?

“I think that’s the playoffs — that’s the challenge, and that’s why you always have to reset,” head coach Tom Thibodeau told reporters at the Knicks’ Thursday practice session. “There’s going to be a lot of emotional highs and lows, and you’ve got to be able to take a punch, and you’ve got to be able to bounce back.”

Given the punch New York just took, that seems like an awfully tall order.

How do you get over losing a game that you led by 14 points with 2:51 remaining in the fourth quarter, and by nine with 58.8 seconds to go? How do you get past coming up short when All-Stars Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns combined for 78 points on 42 shots — the first time in franchise history that two Knicks have each scored 35 or more in a playoff affair, and the first pair of teammates ever to do it in an Eastern Conference finals game, according to Justin Kubatko of Statitudes?

How do you move on from dropping a game that had been New York’s best offensive outing of the 2025 NBA playoffs — a 135.2 offensive rating with 2:51 to go, miles ahead of what the Knicks had mustered against Detroit or Boston? How do you get over seeing Brunson leave the floor after picking up his fifth foul with 10:05 to go, ripping off 14 consecutive points without the Clutch Player of the Year on the court … and that still not being enough?

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“In the playoffs, when you win, it’s the best thing ever,” Brunson said after Game 1. “When you lose, it’s the worst thing ever.”

Step one in moving on, according to Thibodeau: not moving on. Not until you’ve relived it, and taken accountability for it.

“You go through the game, you go through end-of-game — you go through it all,” Thibodeau said Thursday. “And then, what did you learn from it? And what can we commit to?”

For the Knicks, reviewing the film from Game 1 — especially the final 2:51 of regulation and five-minute overtime session, during which Indiana outscored the hosts 33-16 — probably felt like subjecting themselves to the Ludovico technique. On the other side of the masochism, though, lay a message: More than the missed shots and turnovers, it was their defense that let them down.

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“We scored 135 points,” Thibodeau said. “That should be more than enough.”

It wasn’t, because Indiana scored 31 points on its final 13 possessions of regulation, according to NBA.com’s John Schuhmann — many of them coming with Knicks defenders too far out of guarding position to make an impact:

“We fouled in the penalty, so we stopped the clock,” Thibodeau said. “We gave them open 3s. We missed free throws. We gave them second shots … you have to play for all 48 minutes, and you have to challenge shots, and you have to have awareness as to what’s going on in the game.”

What was going on in those tell-tale final few minutes, according to forward Josh Hart, was that the Knicks “let off the gas.” After about 30 minutes of sound defense, holding Indiana to 62 points on 22-for-60 shooting from the start of the second quarter through the midpoint of the fourth, New York seemed content to rest on its double-digit lead … and the Pacers live to make you pay for easing up.

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“The intensity, the physicality wasn’t there,” Hart said.

Breaking down the Knicks’ defensive breakdowns

The comeback started in earnest when Pacers coach Rick Carlisle put the Knicks’ two dodgiest defenders under the microscope, having Aaron Nesmith set an early screen for Tyrese Haliburton to bring Brunson into the action before sending Nesmith out behind a flare screen by Towns’ man, backup center Thomas Bryant. With Brunson caught on Bryant’s flare and Towns dropping back to protect the paint, Nesmith had plenty of room to receive Haliburton’s pass, rise, fire and knock down the first of what would be six fourth-quarter 3-pointers.

“We’ve got to get to their bodies, stay connected,” Brunson said. “They play at a fast pace. They play a space game. So when they’re driving the lanes, it’s easy to collapse, and then we’re in rotation, and then they’re lining up open 3s. We’ve just got to rotate better and get to bodies better. Just making sure we’re connected.”

Just over a minute later, the Pacers again targeted Towns — this time on a baseline out-of-bounds play that began with a pass to Obi Toppin, who’d checked in for Bryant.

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Toppin initially sought to hand the ball off to a curling Haliburton, but Knicks wing OG Anunoby chased Haliburton hard over the top of the screen, prompting Toppin to pull the ball out; instead, he flowed into a two-man action with Nesmith, screening and then re-screening on the wing. The way Mikal Bridges didn’t really try to fight through Toppin’s screen suggested that he thought the Knicks were switching that action. The way Towns had already started retreating toward the paint suggested he thought they were in drop coverage. Whichever one of them was right, they both turned out wrong: Nesmith once again had acres of space to raise up and splash in another triple.

“I think it comes from just relaxing a little bit, you know?” Bridges said at the Knicks’ Thursday practice, where he said the team’s energy was high and its overall vibes were good. “Just relax for a second, and then you’re a step late, or maybe forget, ‘Oh, I’ve got to switch here,’ or ‘I’ve got to rotate here.’ It’s just maintaining that throughout the whole game. … It’s on us to be locked in on our scout and not be random. We’ve got to follow what we’ve got to do — all five guys. Because if one guy branches off, it can mess the next guy up.”

The Pacers went after New York’s stars again a minute later. After Brunson missed a stepback 3 that would’ve pushed the lead to 16, Haliburton again sprinted up the floor, getting an early offense, step-up screen from reserve wing Ben Sheppard — whose contributions during a seven-minute fourth quarter stint Carlisle praised effusively after the game — to again force the Knicks point guard into the action.

Hart stepped up to contain Sheppard’s roll to the rim, but with both Bridges and Brunson still on Haliburton, that left two Knicks to guard three Pacers on the opposite side of the floor. One of those two Knicks was Towns, who leaned toward Toppin, his assignment … which left Nesmith, again, wide open for a catch-and-shoot launch over the top of a late contest by Brunson.

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With New York up nine in the final minute, Indiana targeted Brunson again, with Pascal Siakam pitching the ball to Nesmith and screening Brunson out of the play. Anunoby, like Towns before him, wasn’t nearly quick enough to close the gap against a shooter who’d already seen three go down and had entered the kind of zone where, as Nesmith said after the game, “that basket feels like an ocean, and anything you toss up, you feel like it’s going to go in.”

Even, say, 31-footers off the catch — especially when they’re completely uncontested, because Towns has died on a Siakam screen and is pointing for Anunoby to get up to switch, only Anunoby is all the way below the top of the key when Nesmith starts his shooting motion — or 28-foot, one-dribble pull-ups launched off a dead sprint around a pindown going right.

“I think we just let off a little bit, and then we stopped talking to each other,” Bridges said. “Just a little miscommunication, and they got some rhythm 3s.”

The rhythm they caught late, and the fire shooting out of Nesmith’s fingertips, gave Haliburton the chance to make late-game magic yet again … which, for a Pacers team in the midst of one of the great team 3-point shooting runs in NBA playoff history, is precisely what he did.