NEW YORK — You can’t always take Josh Hart seriously. His jokes fly fast, often hiding more truth than fiction. But every now and then, Hart hits the nail on the head. When the Knicks swingman spoke about how Jalen Brunson’s return might change the way New York plays, his words felt prophetic.
“Kal and OG being in a good rhythm offensively — that’s a good thing,” Hart predicted after the Knicks practiced at Georgia Tech’s Zelnak Center on Friday. “Sometimes, especially in the first two or three quarters, [Jalen] can defer to them a little bit more, not waste so much energy offensively and give a little bit more defensively.
“And then, obviously, the fourth quarter is when it’s time to win — that’s when he has the ball in his hands.”
It didn’t take long to see it unfold.
After a month away recovering from a sprained right ankle, Brunson returned to the floor Sunday for the Knicks’ 112-98 win over the Phoenix Suns — and instead of jumping right back into the driver’s seat, he let OG Anunoby, Mikal Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns help carry the load.
He still closed the game, drilling a dagger 3 in the final minutes. But for much of the night, the All-Star guard was playing off the ball, reading the game, not forcing it.
And that’s the new version of these Knicks — one born out of necessity, and now sharpened for the stretch run.
The Knicks were forced to find new ways to generate offense when Brunson left the rotation with a sprained right ankle in a March 6 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers, an issue that compounded when the next two point guards on the depth chart — Miles McBride (groin) and Cameron Payne (ankle) — went down with injuries shortly after the captain.
The Knicks settled on running more offense through Anunoby and Bridges, the pair of wings who kept the offense humming with the All-Star and captain out due to injury.
And with Brunson back on the floor for the first time in Sunday’s 112-98 victory over the Phoenix Suns, the Knicks proved Hart’s prophecy true.
They went so long without their All-Star captain, they learned to survive without him. Now, they can use that to their advantage, keeping Brunson’s workload low as he works back into form after a month-long injury absence, helping him slow-ramp his way with the playoffs two weeks out.
Brunson was rusty in his first game back on the floor, making just two of his first seven attempts from the field. He deferred to Anunoby, Bridges and Towns at different points in the game to help the Knicks secure their 50th victory for the second season in a row on Sunday.
Anunoby scored nine first-quarter points before erupting for 19 more in the third quarter alone, including 11 straight points in a three-minute span. The star Knicks forward finished with a team-high 32 points on 13-of-17 shooting from the field and 6-of-8 shooting from downtown, marking his 10th consecutive game with 23 points or more. He capped the night with a 360 double-pump dunk in transition to put the Suns away with less than a minute left in regulation.
“I think the sky’s the limit,” Anunoby said in his walk-off interview on Sunday. “We’re a really talented team. We’re tough, we’re hard-nosed, and we’re getting ready for the playoffs.”
This time, he did it with Brunson on the floor, quelling the notion he would need to take a step back on offense or be relegated to a floor-spacing role in the corner with the All-Star guard rejoining the rotation.
“The notion of all that stuff — it’s white noise,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said after Saturday’s 121-105 win over the Atlanta Hawks “The game tells you what to do. Whose shot is it in transition? The open man. And if there’s two on somebody, whose shot is it? The open man. You have the responsibility as a primary scorer to make the right play.
“He’s never been ...
