Knicks Notes: Bridges, Towns, Shamet, Clarkson

Jalen Brunson and OG Anunoby, who combined for 60 of the Knicks‘ 111 points in Monday’s Game 3, were the team’s only reliable scorers in the fourth quarter, tallying 18 points between them on 6-of-11 shooting in the final frame. The rest of the team made just 1-of-16 shots and scored two points en route to a 115-111 loss, as Stefan Bondy of The New York Post writes.

It was an especially frustrating night for Mikal Bridges, who has had an excellent postseason but scored just two points on 1-of-5 shooting in 29 minutes of action on Monday and went 0-for-3 from the floor in the fourth quarter. Bridges wasn’t happy with his play at either end of the court, telling reporters after the game that he’s “gotta be better” on Wednesday, according to Howie Kussoy of The New York Post.

“It starts with me defensively. I think I did a bad job defensively,” Bridges said. “They scored a good amount of times when I was in throughout the game. For me, it starts with defense and feeding off of that.”

We have more on the Knicks, who will take a 2-1 series lead into Game 4:

• Karl-Anthony Towns earned rave reviews for his play at both ends of the court in the first two games of the NBA Finals, but he was “mostly a non-factor” on Monday, scoring just 11 points in 38 minutes, according to Zach Braziller of The New York Post. Head coach Mike Brown said there were issues with the Knicks’ offense as a whole rather than anything specifically related to Towns. Still, as Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic tweets, the star big man has now gone three games without scoring a single fourth-quarter point vs. the Spurs.
• Landry Shamet‘s excellent postseason hit a speed bump in Game 3 as he shot 1-of-8 from the floor and had a team-worst -20 plus/minus mark in his 23 minutes. The veteran wing is confident in his – and the team’s – ability to bounce back and “clean up” some of Monday’s mistakes, as Kussoy relays for The New York Post. “Great process, got some great looks, had a few that were down and out,” Shamet said. “Process over outcome. I’m more upset about some of the things defensively that I’ve been priding myself on. I had a few possessions where I didn’t do my job like I needed to. That’s fixable. Sometimes the gods give you in and outs and the ball doesn’t go in.”
• Veteran guard Jordan Clarkson provided the Knicks with a shot in the arm off the bench in Game 3 after receiving a DNP-CD in Game 2, per Braziller of The New York Post. Clarkson scored 10 points and was a +8 in 13 minutes.
• As dominant as the Knicks were during their 13-game winning streak that stretched from Game 4 of the first round to Game 2 of the Finals, their identity over the past two years has been defined by their resiliency, according to James L. Edwards III of The Athletic, who suggests the club will have an opportunity to show off that trait after suffering a setback on Monday. “They’re a great team,” Anunoby said of the Spurs. “They weren’t just going to lay down. All we can do is move and learn from this. We have to take it as adversity and just respond to it.”