The Knicks Spent A Quarter In Hell

The second quarter of Tuesday night’s Game 2 between the Knicks and Cavaliers started innocuously enough. Cleveland led 25-22 at the start, and the teams took turns missing tough shots against frenetic defenses for a minute and a half.

With around 10:30 on the clock, dribbling up the floor in transition and perhaps paying a little too much attention to the defender behind him, New York’s Julius Randle lost the ball in the middle of Cleveland’s painted area for the Knicks’ first turnover of the quarter. Nothing much came out of it: The Cavs ran the other way, Darius Garland missed a high arcing floater over New York’s Mitchell Robinson, and the Knicks got the rebound. It didn’t feel all that much like a Portent of Doom.

A couple possessions later, with the Cavs’ lead now down to one thanks to a pair of R.J. Barrett free throws, Randle tried a jump-pass in the middle of the lane and sent the ball to nobody in particular, out of bounds. Once again it didn’t hurt the Knicks too bad: Josh Hart committed a foul at the far end to break up a Jarrett Allen dunk attempt, and Allen made one of two free throws. But something seemed to be rattling loose in the Knicks. On their very next possession, Isaiah Hartenstein and Immanuel Quickley got their signals mixed up: Hartenstein thought Quickley was cutting along the baseline, and Quickley thought he was faking a baseline cut and darting back out to the corner, and Hartenstein’s pass sailed out of bounds for another turnover, New York’s third in about 90 seconds.

A minute and a half later, New York now trailing by six, Randle bullied his way to Cleveland’s basket but couldn’t score over a fantastic shot-contest by Allen; Randle and Harteinstein fumbled the offensive rebound and it popped free to Cleveland’s Caris LeVert. Officially this was scored as a turnover by Randle—his third of the period, the Knicks’ fourth—even though he never really had the ball in any meaningful way after the missed shot; on the other hand, between he and Hartenstein, a Knick probably should have had it. LeVert missed a three-pointer in transition, the Cavs got their own offensive rebound, Garland sank a 26-footer, and all of a sudden the Knicks were down by nine and their two best players, Randle and Jalen Brunson, were grabbing various hurt body parts.

Much of this was just the Cavaliers playing extremely well, on their own floor, with a certain amount of desperation lest they lose two home games to start their first playoff series in years. The Cavs are very tall where it counts, and fast, and were the best defensive team in the NBA this season. They are very good at making it very hard to do stuff. But also the Knicks just kept helping them.

With around 6:20 left in the quarter, Brunson kinda dithered on the ball for long indecisive seconds on the right side of the floor, then telegraphed and tried an utterly doomed and foolish one-handed bounce pass through a forest of legs in the middle of the lane, to a not even…