The New York Knicks are disintegrating anyone in their path. They have won seven consecutive playoff games, a franchise record, by a combined 185 points, an NBA record.

After a regular season that included an impressive 53 wins but also left them without a surefire identity, the Knicks have discovered what makes them special. So, what has changed since falling 2-1 during their first-round series against the Atlanta Hawks? Let’s run through three trends that have caught my eye since the last time the Knicks lost a basketball game, more than three weeks ago.

Running ’round Towns

A familiar routine has followed Knicks games all year. Someone on the outside, whether they watched all 48 minutes or not, scans the box score and zeroes in on Karl-Anthony Towns’ shot total. If the number is too low, then allegations follow. “The Knicks did not involve him enough,” they might accuse. Someone could insist, “They got away from Towns.” Maybe, just maybe, they forgot their All-Star center even existed.

Over the past two years, the conversation has turned to a preponderance: How can the Knicks get Towns more shots?

But this is not the correct way to discuss Towns. The shots — or sometimes, the lack of shots — are a symptom, not the ailment. Shot totals can be indicative of a player’s involvement in an offense, but it’s not a one-to-one comparison. A player could shoot only occasionally but still be in the middle of it all, such as what has happened with Towns during this seven-game winning streak.

Towns rarely ever shoots. Yet, he hasn’t been so involved all season. And most importantly, he has never performed at this level.

Over these seven games, he’s averaging 15.7 points, 9.6 rebounds and 8.0 assists. And the numbers are deflated since he’s playing only 26.3 minutes during the stretch, partly because of foul trouble and also because of the many fourth quarters he’s been on the bench during blowouts.

Towns is barely shooting. Over these seven games, he’s taken double-digit shots only twice, and those two games in double-digits were at only 11 and 10 field-goal attempts. But no longer can anyone point to that column and claim he’s uninvolved. The Knicks don’t avoid Towns; they run through him.

Since the Game 4 adjustments against Atlanta, he’s averaging 99 touches per 100 possessions, according to Second Spectrum. Against the Sixers, that number climbed to 103. During the regular season, he averaged only 83.

This is a different Towns, more in line with the one head coach Mike Brown tried to create early in the season but who could not get comfortable as the hopeful hub of the offense.

Now, he’s adopted this style and been one of the best players in the NBA playoffs.

After the Knicks fell 2-1 to the Hawks in Round 1, they rejiggered their offense. Towns stepped in as the lead facilitator, the guy to handle the basketball in the high post, the low post, or even off drives. New York has not lost a game since. He’s never been this willing a passer, as if he’s caught some unknown distributing contagion from himself. The Knicks sliced Atlanta with flex screens and flex cuts, as I wrote following Game 4, but Towns’ advancement is more than just schematic.

He is looking to pass at every opportunity.

Kickouts. Touch passes. Overhead passes. Twisting ones. Ones off drives. Ones from the post where he leans into his defender and holds the ball out backwards. The basketball is a kumquat in Towns’ hands. He’s so large that it looks less like he’s playing hoops and more like he’s teasing a young child with a hapless game of keepaway.

Check out this play from Game 4 of the Knicks’ soul-sucking sweep of the 76ers.

Towns receives the ball on the left side, beyond the 3-point arc, actually a tad farther from the basket than New York would hope. He makes it work anyway. The Knicks have turned to this action time and time again over the seven-game heater. This area is called the ‘pinch post,’ a cushy set for Towns, who stands in the high post as three players run an action on the opposite side of the court.

Watch Jalen Brunson here. He gives the ball up to Towns, then runs to the right side of the court to lay a screen for Bridges. The Knicks ran this action constantly against the Sixers. Sometimes, it was Brunson setting the screen. In other moments, it was Bridges. Here, Philadelphia makes it easy.

Towns is patient. He notices 76ers wing Kelly Oubre Jr. get hung up on the screen, and he finds Bridges for a cutting layup.

Towns is averaging 11.0 assists per 36 minutes over these seven games. For reference, the single-season record for a big man, held by three-time MVP Nikola Jokić, is 11.1.

The shots are way down because Towns is choosing for them to be, not because the Knicks are failing to include him.

He’s never received the basketball this much since joining the Knicks, and he’s revamped what he does next. During the regular season, Towns took a shot on 26 percent of his touches, according to Second Spectrum. During the seven-game winning streak, that rate is down to 15 percent. He’s passing on 71 percent of his touches, compared to 61 percent during the regular season.

In the best-passing season of his career, 2022-23 with the Minnesota Timberwolves, he dished an assist on eight percent of his touches. During the winning streak, he’s more than doubled that number to a shade above 16 percent.

That’s an assist on one in every six touches. Think about it like this: No player since Second Spectrum began tracking this stat in 2013-14 has ever come close to averaging an assist every six touches for a full season.

Not Jokić. Not Chris Paul. Not Rajon Rondo.

No one.

The Knicks have changed Towns’ role. And he hasn’t just embraced it. He has thrived in it.

Getting in the way

Following Wednesday’s practice, Brunson made an in-character declaration. Towns handling the basketball more meant Brunson, normally the head of the offense, touching it less. So, a reporter asked why he seemed so willing to take a step back, given his star status.

“One, I’m not a star. Two, I wanna win,” Brunson said.

The All-NBA point guard is still scoring like someone famous enough to make commercials. He’s still draining 3-pointers and cooking helpless defenders who are unfortunate enough to stand in his way. He’s averaged 27.1 points on outlandish efficiency during these seven games. But he’s also committing to grittier parts of basketball than your average undersized point guard might.

Namely, Brunson is screening.

Put Mike Brown on truth serum and he might admit that Brunson’s screening, beyond all the highlights, turns him the most giddy. He’s called Brunson “second to none” as a pick setter. There is only one small guard in history to whom he would compare the Knicks’ captain — and no, it’s not the greatest shooter of all time, someone who Brown coached for six years and also qualifies as an elite-screening guard, Stephen Curry.

Instead, Brown reached back decades to make his Brunson comparison, to Hall of Famer John Stockton.

“He was tough,” Brown said. “You have to have a toughness about you to screen, because if you are a point guard, you are probably screening somebody bigger than you every time you screen somebody. John had a toughness about him. And Jalen has a toughness about him.”

So, as the ball has found Towns more, Brunson has emerged not just as a cutter but also as a screener. He’s laying those flex screens in the corners for Anunoby and Bridges, which is opening up lanes to the hoop. He’s running the play like the one above where Towns finds Bridges for the assist, constantly. His screens have been effective — and they’re getting Brunson open, too. When a defense jumbles its communication, Brunson can pop to the arc and hit a catch-and-shoot 3-pointer or cut to the hoop for a layup.

During these seven games, Brunson is laying 12.3 off-ball screens per 100 possessions, according to Second Spectrum. At no point in his career has he screened this frequently. During the regular season, he averaged 5.4

The Knicks lost two out of three games to begin the playoffs, transformed their offense afterwards, and now they’ve never looked better.

Rebuilding Bridges

Mikal Bridges was merely on sabbatical. Those moments when he vanished in the Hawks series were him resting up for the main show, the second round of the playoffs and maybe beyond, when the greatest traits of Bridges have merged to create a monster.

He drained his mid-range shots against the 76ers. He attacked the hoop. He streaked in transition. When a pass was intuitive, he made it. And defensively, this was the man the Knicks believed they were trading for a couple of summers ago. Against Philly, he inspired a different kind of vanishing act. Throughout the series, Bridges’ main assignment, Tyrese Maxey, was nowhere to be found.

It could make one think back to the playoff series between these same two teams in 2024. The Knicks won that bout in six games, but not because they could contain Philadelphia’s speedy point guard.

The Knicks started that series with OG Anunoby defending Maxey, but Maxey was too quick for him. They tried other defenders on him. Miles “Deuce” McBride received time. By the decisive Game 6, Donte DiVincenzo was the sacrificial lamb, the best option but hardly an ideal one.

New York survived the series with a lesson learned: If it wanted to contend at the highest levels, it could use a point-of-attack stopper to disrupt smaller, quicker point guards. Such was one of the various reasons it traded five first-round picks for Bridges the ensuing summer. But Bridges wasn’t always what the Knicks figured he could be.

Over the past two years, Bridges has manifested as a brilliant off-ball defender who isn’t nearly as effective once opponents cycle him through pick-and-rolls. He pulls up short when he approaches ball screens. He can shy away from contact. Guys like Maxey can blow past him.

During the regular season, he ranked an impressive 11th in the NBA in BBall-Index’s off-ball chasing metric but rated below league average at navigating pick-and-rolls.

But this was not always Bridges’ identity — and it certainly wasn’t who he was during the four games against the 76ers, when his defense on Maxey and the rest of the team was the most extraordinary development of the series.

Maxey averaged less than a point every other minute against the Knicks. His shooting and assist numbers dropped into the toilet. The Knicks trapped him routinely. After he gave up the ball in those scenarios, Bridges would take off with him as he darted to the corner. On a couple of plays, he used his length to bat away lobs and cause steals. Maxey could not even pass out of the double-team.

Watch how Bridges handles the play below.

The Knicks are not set up ideally. Bridges begins the possession on rookie guard VJ Edgecombe. Maxey recognizes there is a big man guarding him. The Knicks try to switch, moving Mitchell Robinson over to Edgecombe and Bridges to Maxey, but Robinson is late. Bridges must take Maxey while also keeping Edgecombe in mind.

One guy should be open.

But he’s not.

This is where Bridges excels, defending not just players but areas. Somehow, he manages to cut off a lane for Maxey while also denying a pass to Edgecombe. Maxey tries to create an advantage but cannot and Bridges, with those never-ending arms, deflects the bounce and gets the steal.

We should have known a dominant performance was on the way from the start. On literally the first possession of the series, Bridges blew up each action the Sixers tried to run.

If shot clock violations could be credited as steals, this would have tallied as one for Bridges.

He begins the play on Maxey in the left corner. Philadelphia’s goal is to get the ball to its fiery guard on the move. Once Maxey picks up full speed, no one — save for maybe Usain Bolt — can keep up with him. Place a couple of giants in the way of whoever is chasing him, and that person rarely stands a chance.

Unless that player is Bridges.

Maxey scrambles around one screen from Oubre, but Bridges bounces off it. He then receives the ball from Joel Embiid, who could not possibly be shorter than 25 feet tall. Embiid is waiting to impede Bridges, but Bridges doesn’t even touch him, instead slithering around his left hip. In these three seconds, Bridges is no basketball player; he is a cat running an obstacle course.

Maxey curls around the screen with a step on Bridges, then bounces a pass back to Embiid. Bridges must switch onto him. The size difference is notable, but Embiid doesn’t create deep post positioning. He moves into one of his patented turnaround jumpers, but Bridges gives him zero space and a panicky pass goes back to Maxey on the right wing.

Towns closes out intelligently, taking away the 3-pointer and having faith that the defenders behind him will react appropriately. His belief paid off.

OG Anunoby lunges over from the corner to hamper Maxey’s drive to the hoop, and Bridges slides off Embiid to close off Maxey’s other side. All that’s left is a frantic kickout to Embiid, which flings wide left.

On the first possession of the series, the Knicks forced a shot-clock violation because Bridges and the rest of the crew would not let up.

For all the deserved talk about the Knicks’ dynamic offense, the defense has been far more stifling than their reputation suggests. Over the final 41 games of the regular season, they were third in the NBA in points allowed per possession.

That was without their best rim-protector, Mitchell Robinson, playing every day. It was without Towns defending as well as he has during the playoff run. It was without Jordan Clarkson turning into an unhinged fanatic of the full-court press. And it was without Bridges guarding at the All-Defensive level, which he did against the 76ers.