Aggressive Knicks D leads to sizable halftime lead vs. Cavs
If it was in doubt at all whether the Knicks were treating tonight's matchup with the Cavaliers as some sort of revenge game, that went out the window pretty quickly in the early going. Aggressive defense and rebounding helped propel the Knicks to a 64-51 halftime lead.
Julius Randle blazed to 15 points and the team took a commanding 32-20 lead out of the first quarter.
Randle continued shooting hot in the second quarter, pouring in eight more points to balloon his total to 23 in the first half. Frank Ntilikina added six points on 3-4 shooting and five assists, while Marcus Morris scored 12 points and was a team-high plus-22.
Here are some other notes from the first half:
1) Randle wasn't necessarily playing all that much different than he has been. The main difference is, the shots are falling today. You can live with the mid-range shots and threes from Randle if he's canning them. It's once he's not (which, to be clear, he has almost exclusively not had success from anywhere outside the paint this year) where things become a problem.
2) It will absolutely help you drop 23 points in a half if you suddenly ignite and hit 3-5 from deep after starting the season under 20 percent. If Randle can split the difference and end up anywhere near 40 percent for the rest of the season, that would be really useful.
3) This type of pass is why people often swoon about Frank Ntilikina's passing skills:
He really sees the floor in a way that not a lot of guys on the Knicks do. Maybe to a fault at times! But you can never fault Frank for not having his head up.
4) The Knicks' defense was insanely aggressive, doubling constantly and trying to force turnovers throughout the half. Sometimes they even played kind of a 3-2 zone, which seemed to work pretty well for hiding Bobby Portis and Randle on defense. Of course, the downside is that if the Cavs ballhandler was able to pass out of the tight coverage, there was an open shooter a pass or two away more times than not. The Cavs wound up hitting 9-15 from deep, but the 11 turnovers forced by the Knicks managed to mitigate that.
5) RJ Barrett's shot seemed to be missing something all first half. He shot 0-5, but did manage to hit three of four free throws. Silver linings!
