CJ McCollum walks down Knicks, outduels Jalen Brunson in brutal Game 2 loss 38%
By C.J. Holmes0%
4/21/2026, 3:14:35 AM
Topics: Sports
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Unattributed Quote, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 37% saturation with 473 hits. Analysis detected 2,576 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,279 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 43.6% and a BS Rank of 38% (10,567 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 62.80% of the article peer group.
For most of Monday night, the Knicks kept acting like they had this series exactly where they wanted it.
They'd already seen Jalen Brunson blow open Game 1 with an opening-quarter blitz.
In Game 2, they found another way.
Josh Hart set the tone.
Mikal Bridges supplied early scoring.
Mitchell Robinson changed the game off the bench.
Karl-Anthony Towns finally came alive after halftime.
Brunson, as he always seems to, showed up late when the score got uncomfortable.
None of it was enough, because CJ McCollum wouldn't let the Knicks get to the finish line.
McCollum walked them down inside Madison Square Garden, answered Brunson every time the Knicks tried to breathe, and turned what should have been a 2-0 series lead into a 107-106 Atlanta Hawks win that ripped home-court advantage out of the building and sent this first-round series to State Farm Arena on Thursday tied 1-1.
Brunson finished with 29 points and seven assists.
Towns had 18 points and eight rebounds, with 14 of those points coming in the third quarter after another quiet first half.
Robinson delivered a playoff career-high 13 points and seven rebounds in 18 minutes off the bench.
McCollum finished with 32 points, three rebounds and six assists, and every one of his late buckets felt heavier than the last.
The Knicks were up eight when Brunson floated one in from seven feet with 5:26 left, a bucket that should have pushed them to the finish line.
Instead, it was the start of the unraveling.
Nickeil Alexander-Walker drilled a 3.
Jalen Johnson got to the rim.
After a Knicks timeout, OG Anunoby missed, and McCollum went slicing through the defense before kissing one high off the glass for a 101-100 Hawks lead with 2:08 left.
Anunoby then missed both free throws on the Knicks' next trip.
McCollum scored again.
Brunson answered with a 3 to tie it at 103 with 1:21 left.
McCollum answered with a 14-footer.
Then came the possession that broke the Knicks open: Brunson got stripped by Alexander-Walker, Johnson ran out for a transition slam, and suddenly the Knicks were chasing.
Brunson's 3 with 8.5 seconds left kept them alive.
McCollum missing both free throws on the next possession gave them one last chance.
Bridges' pull-up at the horn came up short.
Brown said it plainly afterward, pointing to the numbers that showed where the Knicks lost control.
“In a playoff game, it's tough to win against a good team when you shoot 60% from the free throw line in a one-possession game,” Brown said.
“We missed 10 free throws — one-possession game.
We had 14 turnovers for 18 points, so that's how they beat us in transition.”
That was the brutal part of the night.
The Knicks didn't lose because they were overwhelmed.
They lost because they kept opening the door for a team that was desperate enough to keep charging through it.
And that was supposed to be one of the Game 2 warnings.
Before tip, Brown said Atlanta would come back playing faster, crashing harder and firing more 3s after what it saw on film in the opener.
He got exactly that.
The second quarter was where it first showed itself.
The Knicks' second unit coughed the ball up, Landry Shamet's minutes got messy, and the slopiness Brown had spent the afternoon talking about gave the Hawks life.
A Deuce McBride turnover that led to a Jonathan Kuminga dunk put Atlanta up 36-35 with 8:13 left in the first half and forced Brown back to the starters who had built the lead in the first place.
That's what made the final result so hard for the Knicks to swallow.
For long stretches, they had answered the Game 1 questions better than they did two nights earlier.
Game 1 belonged to Brunson from the jump.
Game 2, at least early, belonged to the group.
Hart opened the night by chesting up Johnson and forcing a fumble out of bounds.
A few possessions later he darted off a Towns dribble handoff, beat Dyson Daniels to the rim for a two-handed slam, then scored again over Onyeka Okongwu.
Bridges had eight points in the opening quarter.
Robinson kept rising at the rim for lob dunk after lob dunk after Mouhamed Gueye exited early with a hip injury after missing a transition dunk.
All five starters combined for 26 of the Knicks' 32 points in the first quarter, and the Knicks held Atlanta to 37.5% shooting in the period while taking a 32-23 lead.
Even after the second-quarter slippage, they still went to halftime up 61-54 on Bridges' off-balance step-through 10-footer at the buzzer.
That came with Towns stuck on four points and two rebounds, with the Knicks only 5-for-17 from 3, and with seven missed free throws.
McCollum had 18 at the break, and still the Knicks had the game where they wanted it.
Then Towns gave them what looked like the quarter that would put the night away.
Game 2 started echoing Game 1 after halftime, when Towns finally found rhythm and the Knicks looked like the more gifted team all over again.
He scored 14 points on 6-for-7 shooting in the third.
The Knicks shot 60% in the period.
The Hawks missed all nine of their 3-point attempts in the quarter.
The lead grew to 91-79 entering the fourth, and for a while it looked like the Knicks had done exactly what they needed to do: survive the sloppy stretches, punish Atlanta with superior shotmaking and put themselves in position to walk out with a 2-0 lead.
They just never finished it.
Brown's late-game timeout usage became part of the story, too.
The Knicks let their use-it-or-lose-it timeout vanish when they played past the 3:00 mark of the fourth without stopping it, so when Brown called timeout with 2:43 left after, in his words, a couple possessions “weren't fluid,” the Knicks were down to one remaining.
They used that final timeout with 10 seconds left after Brunson's 3 cut the deficit to one.
Brown said afterward that even if he'd still had a timeout on the final play, he likely would've preferred to let it run so Atlanta couldn't load up its best defenders.
Bridges got to a spot the Knicks have seen him score from before.
It just didn't fall.
The loss was bigger than one timeout and bigger than one final shot.
It lived in the missed free throws, in the turnovers, in the loose balls Brown said Atlanta attacked with more desperation in the fourth, and in the Knicks' inability to organize themselves once the game got tight.
For a team that posted the best fourth-quarter net rating in franchise history during the 2025-26 regular season, the finish was jarring.
The Knicks hadn't scored 15 points or fewer in the fourth quarter all season until Monday night.
Brunson owned his piece of it.
“Maybe a little stagnant,” he said.
“Poor decision-making on my part in some possessions… We just got to play better with the lead.
That's twice in the fourth quarter now.”
Hart was even more direct.
“This is a game we should've won,” he said.
“In the playoffs we can't give away games.”
That's the line that should stay with them all the way to Atlanta.
Because for three quarters, the Knicks had enough.
Enough force from Hart.
Enough scoring from Bridges.
Enough juice from Robinson.
Enough second-half scoring from Towns.
Enough late shotmaking from Brunson.
McCollum just kept walking.
And when the Knicks finally ran out of answers, he walked right out of the Garden with the game.
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