Knicks’ Mikal Bridges returns to Brooklyn in a far different role

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, with his team down by three late in the third quarter, New York Knicks wing Mikal Bridges decided he wasn’t going to be denied.

Seeing teammate Deuce McBride launch a long jumper, Bridges ran to the block to get into position for a potential offensive board. After tapping McBride’s miss back into the air to himself, Bridges caught the ball, squared himself to take a short corner jumper of his own, and absorbed contact from Spurs guard Keldon Johnson, all in one fluid motion.

The shot went down, sending Madison Square Garden into a tizzy. And Bridges, who’d fallen to the ground due to Johnson’s foul, remained on the floor to flex his right bicep and then his left one for the television cameras before tying the game with the ensuing free throw.

Bridges was flat-out dominant that day, notching 15 points in the fourth — including a game-sealing jumper — to finish with 41 points. The performance, his strongest as a Knick by a mile, was the high point of a great month for Bridges, who had the NBA’s best effective field goal rate (65.7%) in December among players who took at least 15 shots per game.

The euphoria surrounding the showcase game helped balance what had been an up-and-down start from Bridges, the seventh-year veteran whom the Knicks traded five first-round draft picks to acquire from the Brooklyn Nets — an outlay believed to be the most first-round picks dealt for a player who has never previously been an All-Star in NBA history.

Josh Hart, who won a national title with Bridges at Villanova before reuniting with him in New York, said his friend’s Christmas showing was validation.

“When you see someone put the work in, you know what they’re capable of, and the character that he has. We knew that,” Hart said. “We knew it was a matter of time before he found ‘it.’ Now he’s found it, and [the media] ain’t saying nothing. Get your apology forms out. I’ll be collecting them tomorrow. Give him his flowers.”

With Bridges returning to play in Brooklyn on Tuesday for the first time since the deal, the jury is still out on how it has shaken out for the Knicks. And much of that stems from how Bridges is still adjusting to a far different role from the one he had with the Nets for a year and a half.

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IT WAS HALFTIME of New York’s season opener against the Boston Celtics, and alarms were already sounding among impatient fans on social media:

Is Mikal Bridges’ jump shot broken?

He had launched only five attempts in the first half against the Celtics, and all five were misses. “None of these shots are even close,” TNT analyst Reggie Miller said on the telecast, sounding befuddled. (Bridges rebounded in the second half of the blowout loss to score 16 points on 7-for-8 shooting.)

Fan reactions, hasty as they might have been, weren’t the result of a lackluster first half to begin the regular season. Bridges, a 37.5% career 3-point shooter who opted to overhaul his jump shot during the offseason, had shot just 11% (2-for-18) from deep in the preseason.

Bridges said he merely wanted to tweak his shooting form to make it more like the one he utilized throughout college, and said he wasn’t worried. (His average wrist height on catch-and-shoot 3s is four inches higher than last season, the NBA’s third-biggest increase among players with 100 attempts or more, per Second Spectrum tracking.)

The struggles from the perimeter lasted for the first 19 games, with Bridges — who has hit the most corner 3s in the NBA over the past six years –connecting on 31.6% of his tries over that span. But a breakout showing against the New Orleans Pelicans, when he hit 7-of-12 from outside, helped him thaw out some.

For all the focus on his shooting, or the way his jumper looks compared to before, there have been even bigger changes to his game than that since he joined the Knicks. As the team’s third or fourth option on offense, Bridges’ ballhandling responsibilities are down considerably from his Brooklyn days.

He’s getting 67.9 touches per game, down 19% from the 82.4 he got last season as one of the Nets’ lead playmakers. His usage rate is just 18.6%, his lowest since his last full season with the Phoenix Suns in 2021-22.

“You want everyone to make sacrifices for the betterment of the team, and he’s done that,” coach Tom Thibodeau said when asked to assess Bridges’ season so far. “We know what he’s done in this league. But when you have the players that we have, they all have to make sacrifices. He has played really good basketball for us. And as time goes on, it’ll get better and better.”

He’s been fantastic from midrange, shooting 50% on 2-point jumpers, fifth in the NBA among players with at least 100 attempts. (He’s been even more efficient at the basket, where he has shot almost 76% on layups and dunks; impressive since he shot a career-worst 57% last season.)

The trade-off, though, is that Bridges appears to settle at times, opting to pull up or pass rather than challenging rim protectors. After averaging nearly four free throw attempts per game last season, he now takes just one per night. During a 16-game stretch between Nov. 1 and Dec. 1 Bridges took just six free throws total.

But for all the adjustments there have been on offense playing alongside former college teammate Jalen Brunson and fellow offseason acquisition Karl-Anthony Towns, Bridges’ biggest shift has taken place on the defensive side of the ball, where teams have forced him to work harder than ever before.

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AS THE SECONDS ticked off the clock last month at the Garden, and Hawks star Trae Young knelt down on one knee to pretend to roll dice on the Knicks’ massive half court logo, an exhausted Bridges began untucking his jersey and walking off the floor.

Bridges did a respectable job chasing around the three-time All-Star. Young finished with 22 points on 22 attempts in the Knicks’ NBA Cup quarterfinals loss on Dec. 11 and was held scoreless on six shots in the fourth quarter.

And if Bridges, who leads the league in minutes this season and hasn’t missed a game in his six-plus-year career, hadn’t been tired enough, the Hawks set a whopping 50 screens on Bridges that night while he was defending the ball handler, the most any NBA player has faced this season. Overall, Bridges is being screened nearly 25 times per night, the highest rate since Second Spectrum started tracking it 12 years ago. Bridges did well defending Young in Monday’s win, limiting him to 8-for-22 shooting while helping force him into nine turnovers against just six assists. (On one play, Bridges shadowed Young for an entire possession, forcing a shot-clock violation that brought the Garden to its feet.)

But in previous roles, he was defending big wings as opposed to floor generals for entire games, a defensive tweak that Thibodeau uses to free up the smaller Brunson, who isn’t nearly as nimble or imposing defensively.

Asked about the shift in having to defend so many ball screens from night to night, Bridges largely downplayed the task and how taxing it might be on him. “With every team, it’s obviously a slightly different role. I’m just trying to do the best I can, honestly,” he told ESPN.

“Teams wanted to try attacking him, because it was a different spot for him; especially early on,” a Western Conference scout said of Bridges repeatedly serving as a point-of-attack defender. “If you got past him initially, you could force all sorts of aggressive rotations because the team was still getting used to having Towns at the rim. And the collective trust didn’t look like it was there.”

It was a rough start for Bridges and the Knicks on D; particularly in terms of rim protection. But the team’s fortunes skyrocketed as that end of the floor improved. Much of that stemmed from Bridges and Towns getting used to their roles. (Towns had plenty of experience as a rim protector, but he had played alongside four-time Defensive Player of the Year Rudy Gobert for the prior two seasons.)

As a duo, Bridges and Towns went from giving up 110 points per 100 possessions as a defensive pick-and-roll tandem through Nov. 28 to allowing just 101 points per 100 plays since.

The question that remains unanswered is how good Bridges and the Knicks can ultimately be. The club spent a ton of draft capital on Bridges, then signed on to pay OG Anunoby handsomely, with the goal of having one of the league’s best wing tandems.

The Knicks, who have so far dominated a weak slate of competition in December and are 16-3 against sub-.500 teams — have looked like a team that can soundly beat the teams they’re supposed to. And Bridges was arguably the Knicks’ best player during that stretch against mostly lesser competition. On the flip side, the Knicks have been a cut beneath the NBA’s best units — just 12-13 against teams .500 or better — and often unable to get defensive stops in a handful of critical moments.

If Bridges can consistently lift them against the league’s juggernauts, it would suggest that the historic haul of draft picks to acquire him was well spent.

ESPN Research’s Matt Williams contributed to this story.