The Knicks have fought a season-long identity crisis, and the self-assured Pacers have them on the ropes

The Indiana Pacers know exactly who they are.

They're a run-and-gun outfit built on Tyrese Haliburton's transition brilliance and their stellar depth.

Every player contributes to that style in some essential way.

Their depth keeps everyone fresh enough to play at a pace their opponent struggles to match.

Pretty much everyone reaches a baseline of competence in ball-handling, shooting and defense, not only limiting their weaknesses but allowing them to punish mismatches wherever they see them.

The Pacers, who are now up 3-1 in the Eastern Conference finals against the Knicks , have a coherent identity.

That's not surprising.

We've reached the conference finals.

You usually need one to make it this far.

For the Oklahoma City Thunder , it's their swarming defense.

Everything flows out of their ability to force turnovers.

The Minnesota Timberwolves lean on their size and athleticism.

They want to wall off the paint on one end and let Anthony Edwards penetrate it on the other.

The elevator pitch for these teams is straightforward.

They're not perfect, but you broadly know what the theory of their team is.

But who are the New York Knicks ? That's a complicated question.

It had an easier answer a year ago, when they were the NBA's best rebounding team and a top-10 defense.

They were the stereotypical Tom Thibodeau team, winning on grit and guile no matter how thin injuries made them.

If you're looking for a turning point, it came at the beginning of free agency last year.

Isaiah Hartenstein was a central figure in New York's 2023-24 season, giving Thibodeau the rim-protection he needed while also serving as critical connective tissue offensively.

Hartenstein's passing kept everyone engaged no matter how much dribbling Jalen Brunson did.

His screening was itself a major form of offense, generating 8.3 points per game off of screen assists.

His little flip shot was an escape hatch for dead possessions.

And the CBA so limited what New York could offer him that he had little choice but to sign with the Thunder.

The Knicks traded for Karl-Anthony Towns in part to reinvent themselves.

They couldn't be their old selves without Hartenstein so they didn't try.

The goal of their newfound Towns-at-center team was to become an offensive dynamo.

His pick-and-roll with Brunson was supposed to be unstoppable.

The Knicks were supposed to be a five-out monster.

It never quite materialized.

The pick-and-roll was disarmed by defenses putting a wing on Towns and letting their center roam off of Josh Hart .

Their vaunted starting five played the most minutes in the NBA , but outscored opponents by a paltry 3.3 points per 100 possessions.

Defense played a bigger part in that mediocrity than offense.

The Knicks knew coming into the season that it would be an uphill climb on that end of the floor.

Their point guard and center play with a target on their back.

The idea of trading five first-round picks for Mikal Bridges was to support their two defensive liabilities with dominant wings in between them.

Bridges was a Defensive Player of the Year runner-up for the 2022 Suns .

He was...

maybe a shade above average for the Knicks? Tyrese Haliburton's monster Game 4 was almost fitting.

Between Bridges and OG Anunoby , the Knicks poured an overwhelming amount of resources into point-of-attack defense and still had no answers whatsoever for the star point guard that stands between them and the Finals.

Thibodeau has spent this whole series desperately searching for something to latch onto.

His Game 3 starting lineup change was necessary, but jarring in the context of his career.

No coach has historically relied on a smaller number of players than he has.

Kenny Smith joked on TNT during Game 3 that Thibodeau "wouldn't play nine guys in a baseball game." Well, in Game 4, he used 10.

Delon Wright and Landry Shamet were out of the rotation a week ago.

They played do-or-die fourth quarter minutes in Game 4.

None of this is in character for him.

Neither is the switching the Knicks have done defensively.

The Knicks don't have much choice in that regard.

You can't blitz Haliburton.

He's too dangerous as a passer.

Playing drop-coverage, Thibodeau's typical preference, is death against the caliber of shooters Indiana uses.

But switching is a style predicated on communication and instinct.

It requires muscle memory that needs to be built up over an entire season.

The Knicks don't have that, but they don't have a base scheme they can rely on in this series either.

They've been forced to play Indiana's game for most of this series.

Never was that more evident than in the first half of Game 4, which the Pacers turned into a track meet even off of made Knicks baskets.

New York took the bait and engaged.

Indiana scored 43 points in the first quarter.

The Knicks only managed to slow the Pacers down during Haliburton's time on the bench.

Rarely have the Knicks been able to dictate the terms of engagement in quite the same way.

TAKE A BOW, TYRESE HALIBURTON 32 PTS 15 AST (0 TO) 12 REB 4 STL 5 3PM HE HAS THE @Pacers ONE WIN AWAY FROM THE FINALS! pic.twitter.com/x3la65XvpG What exactly would New York's preferred game script be here? Just keep it close and hope that Brunson's one-on-one heroics can win it at the end? Brunson generally did his part offensively in Game 4.

He got to the line like crazy.

So did everyone on the Knicks.

But their half-court process was pretty dependent on whistles.

Far too many possessions here are ending in forced mid-range jumpers.

Bridges is especially susceptible.

He's been fairly feast or famine throughout this postseason.

He's shooting 38.4% from the floor and 24.3% from deep in first halves this postseason.

When he gets hot in the second, New York often wins.

When he doesn't, the team often loses.

Is he struggling to develop much rhythm in New York's one-on-one heavy offense? That's possible.

The Knicks are averaging around 70 fewer passes per game in the playoffs than the Pacers.

The Knicks don't need to be the Pacers.

They need to be the best version of themselves, and the scary thought here is that even into late May, they haven't quite found that team yet.

They've leaned more and more into a double-big alignment that Mitchell Robinson's regular-season injury prevented, and it's at least helped them start dominating the glass again.

But that group is just so slow compared to Indiana, and Robinson hasn't been nearly as strong a pick-and-roll partner for Brunson as he has been in the past.

Could they go the other way and embrace the five-out style the Towns traded portended? Doing so would probably mean starting Deuce McBride over Hart.

That's a lineup the Knicks have used for all of 16 playoff possessions.

What can the Knicks, as a team, really rely on at this point? Does it have a single, unequivocally elite trait? For all of the whistles Brunson draws individually, the Knicks ranked 24th in free-throw rate during the regular season.

They ranked 28th in 3-point rate.

They're obviously not a ball-movement-heavy offense, and their paint offense has dipped noticeably in the postseason.

Their defense only works when either Towns or Brunson is off of the floor.

When the two play together this postseason, according to Cleaning the Glass, the Knicks allow 117.3 points per 100 possessions.

Remove Towns from the equation and Brunson-plus-defense lineups are allowing only 112.

Flip the two and that number plummets to 97.8.

That's the fear here.

New York has assembled an impressive collection of talent, and that talent was enough to get it to the Eastern Conference finals.

But there's compelling evidence here that these players are not lifting one another in the ways in which the Knicks surely hoped.

The whole might me less than the sum of the parts.

Whether that can be addressed through superior coaching or tweaks on the margins are questions for the offseason.

For now, the Knicks are just going to have to keep searching, and they'd better find their answer soon, because the Pacers have had theirs for more than a year now..

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