If you had to ask me what color crayon I’d want to be colored by, I’d have to choose surprised. The New York Knicks defeated the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers last night, 111-96. I was expecting the win against a injured Lakers team, but was not expecting a fifteen point win like we got. We played it very close in the first half, but the Lakers unwinded in the second half and we got the much needed win. The Lakers remain at 5th in the Western Conference at 33-21, and will have some of their players returning shortly. The Knicks remain at the 8th seed in the Eastern Conference, only a half a game behind the Celtics and Hornets. I was very impressed with how good New York did, and I want to get into what we did well, and what we didn’t do well in the game.
The Lakers highest scorer was Dennis Schroder, who scored 21 points and also had 6 assists in a beautiful game from him. Besides that, Kyle Kuzma and Markieff Morris both did well, and that’s about it. My first key to winning was minimizing Andre Drummond, and we did exactly that. Drummond scored 3 points in 25 minutes, one of his worst games of his career offensively. On the Knicks side of the ball, Julius Randle scored 34 points and had 10 rebounds in 39 minutes of play, another All-NBA caliber performance from the best Knick since Carmelo Anthony. Elfrid Payton came out of nowhere scoring 20 points, and Derrick Rose dropped 14 points in 20 minutes, utilizing his bench role beautifully. Immanuel Quickley didn’t do as well as usual, only scoring 5 points in 15 minutes of play. In 9 minutes of action, Obi Toppin scored 3 points and pulled down 2 rebounds, typical Toppin numbers. The worst performance of the night surprisingly goes to RJ Barrett, something I didn’t expect to type this morning. In 33 minutes, RJ scored 7 points. The Knicks had one of their worst three point nights this season, going 5/27 from behind the arc, only 18.5% from three. Although we didn’t shoot well from three, we did have an impressive FG% of 47.2%. Another impressive stat we had was that we had 14 steals compared to their five, and 54 points in the pain compared to their 38. While we couldn’t compete from three with them, we steal dominated the defending NBA champions. I am impressed with the Knicks awful playing, but still grabbing a double digit win to keep us in the playoff race. We play against the New Orleans Pelicans in New Orleans at 8 PM EST tomorrow night, so stay tuned for my analysis of the game tomorrow, and as always, go Knicks!
TheDyspatch 