Cavaliers built a trap, but the Knicks sprung it on James Harden

NEW YORK — The New York Knicks stole the Cleveland Cavaliers’ favorite strategy, then obliterated them with it.

With New York down 22 points during Tuesday’s fourth quarter, Jalen Brunson dribbled into what should have been a meaningless pick-and-roll. His teammate, OG Anunoby, laid the screen. The Cavaliers switched defenders. Brunson trekked into the paint and floated a shot into the hoop.

Without much time to go in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, the Knicks trailed by 20.

Until they tried the move again. And again. One pick-and-roll. Then another. And another. And Cleveland’s edge shrank.

To 17. Then 15. Then 14.

That’s when the Cavaliers lost the plot. They had built a gargantuan lead, one so large that no team in the history of the playoffs had let an equivalent one vanish with so little time to go, much because of their defensive alignment. From the beginning of the game, Cleveland stuck its center, Jarrett Allen, on Josh Hart, a do-everything wing who actually doesn’t do one thing: shoot 3-pointers consistently. The matchup allowed Allen to roam down low, clogging the paint and walling off opportunities for layups and cushy kickout passes.

The Knicks did not have space and thus could not manufacture top-tier offense.

Not with Allen obstructing the middle. Not with the team running its early-game offense through Karl-Anthony Towns, a strategy that didn’t work as well as it had earlier in the playoffs, considering former Defensive Player of the Year Evan Mobley was draped all over him. And not with the Cavaliers’ top perimeter defender, Dean Wade, attaching himself well enough to Brunson.

New York scored a paltry 68.8 points per 100 possessions with Hart on the court in Game 1. It more than doubled that figure when he was off it. And so, by the fourth quarter, head coach Mike Brown had opted away from the man who is usually one of his most trusted wings. Hart went to the bench. Landry Shamet, a reliable long-range marksman, replaced him. The Knicks had solved one element of Cleveland’s defensive blueprint. As the lead dwindled, at least the Cavaliers still had Wade on Brunson — and at least they held onto a 14-point advantage with only five-and-a-half minutes to go.

Then they conceded both.

With the lead down to 14, Brunson jogged up the court, dribbling at Wade without much threat. After he crossed the logo, Mikal Bridges approached, presumably for a screen, one he never actually had to set.

The strategy the Knicks had ripped from Cleveland was one they had used to slice apart the Philadelphia 76ers during a second-round, four-game sweep. Against Philly, they targeted Joel Embiid’s unfleet feet. It took them 40 minutes versus the Cavaliers to select their new victim.

“There’s no secret we were attacking (James) Harden,” Brown said.

Once the Knicks started, they did not stop. On the back ends of each of these screens for Brunson, the ones that chopped the lead to 20, then 17, then 15, then 14, and beyond was Harden, the former MVP who is known better for his stepback jumpers than for his defensive acumen.

Cleveland should have been as equipped as anyone to notice in the moment what was going down. No one targets defenders with the persistence of the Cavs.

In an off-kilter way, the Cavaliers are bullies — not ones who commit physical sins but the manipulative types, the kinds who identify your self-conscious thoughts and understand exactly how to poke them. Cleveland finds a weakness, then preys. Its top two creators, Harden and Donovan Mitchell, seek out the other team’s worst defender, then run play after play at his throat.

They don’t bombard areas as much as they scramble people. The opposite holds, too, as Atkinson admitted during the group’s previous series, when it scooted by the Detroit Pistons in seven games. Detroit’s third-year wing, Ausar Thompson, engulfed dribblers and gobbled up passes as if he were Ed Reed. So, the Cavs made him the anti-target. Wherever Thompson was, Atkinson advised his team, Cleveland should ensure the ball went somewhere else.

Somehow, though, the Cavs could not react properly when their modus operandi was happening to them.

The Knicks placed Harden in pick-and-roll after pick-and-roll. After 40 minutes of grabbing a commanding lead in large part because of the defensive matchups, Cleveland allowed what was working to evaporate.

The Brunson-Bridges pick-and-roll — if you can even call that a pick — with five-and-a-half minutes to go was the tell.

Look at Bridges as he approaches Brunson. He makes no contact. He causes no fracas. The Cavaliers switch … just because. They lose the matchup they want, Wade on Brunson, for no reason. And they are stuck with their last choice, an all-world scorer on one of the league’s greatest bystanders.

Harden cares not to move on defense. In fact, such a statement is quantifiable. Second Spectrum tracks the speeds at which players move throughout the course of all games. It can then show what percentage of the time a player goes at a slow speed, a medium speed or a fast speed. Harden moved slowly or not at all 81 percent of the time on defense this season. Of the 582 players who stepped on an NBA court in 2025-26, that ranked dead last.

The Knicks saw a couch potato and figured he wouldn’t conjure up the energy to slide to another cushion.

After Wade switched to Bridges and Harden took Brunson, one lefty crossed up another and banked a floater off the glass.

The next possession, Brunson got Harden onto him and nailed a mid-range jumper. The next time, he targeted Harden and dropped in another floater. The deficit shrank to eight.

These were difficult shots in a vacuum, ones from areas of the court that aren’t the most efficient for your average player, but Brunson is far from your average player. These are the shots he hunts, especially when he doesn’t have to work for them. The Knicks, just like the Cavs, were not attacking an area; they were targeting a player.

Atkinson subbed out Wade. He left Harden in the game and steered clear of timeouts, leaving three in his pocket as the Knicks served the Cavs a taste of their own medicine. Sam Merrill became Brunson’s primary defender.

Nothing changed.

On the next play, Brunson and Bridges ran a pick-and-roll, targeting Harden again. The Cavs switched, and Brunson shook Harden for a 3-pointer. Five-point game.

With under two minutes to go in a six-point game, Brunson toyed with Harden again. The Cavs had switched up their coverage, sending both defenders in the pick-and-roll at Brunson, but the Knicks guard beat the trap, scurrying to the right side of the court and forcing Harden to help. The former NBA MVP trudged into no-man’s land, too far from Bridges, and Brunson bounced a pass to Bridges for a 3-pointer. Three-point game.

The Knicks ran 16 pick-and-rolls at Harden just in the final period Tuesday, the most fourth-quarter pick-and-rolls ever run at a guard, according to Second Spectrum, which began tracking this stat in 2013-14. At least in the past 13 years, Harden had not been targeted with so little mercy. And he had not targeted anyone else with such precision either.

It happened again when the Knicks tied it.

Anunoby screened for Brunson. Both defenders followed the Knicks’ explosive guard. Anunoby popped to the 3-point arc. Brunson swung the ball to him. A defender rushed from the weak side, which left Shamet, the man in for Hart, open in the corner.

Anunoby hot potatoed a dime to him for a triple that touched every part of the rim before falling into the net.

The shot seemed predetermined. A year ago, the Knicks crumbled historically during Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals. “Aaron Nesmith” became a curse word in Madison Square Garden. Tyrese Haliburton tied the game on a buzzer-beater that whacked into the back of the rim and propelled toward the ceiling before somehow falling back through the hoop.

Tuesday’s game was another Game 1 of another conference finals. There was another comeback, this one a makeup. That 3-pointer jangling around the iron before deciding to go in was a formal apology from the basketball gods for last season’s heartbreak.

But the rest was no gift from a higher being. Brunson scored 15 just in the fourth quarter. New York’s onslaught continued into overtime. The Knicks recognized the matchups that were not working, discovered the ones that were, attacked them with vigor, and then beat the Cavs at their own game.