What was billed as a clash of Eastern Conference titans at Little Caesars Arena on Monday hardly lived up to the hype. Early in the second quarter, the Detroit Pistons hit the gas, slammed the pedal to the floor, and never let up, leaving the New York Knicks — the team that eliminated Detroit from the 2025 NBA playoffs, a sour taste that has fueled the Pistons’ surge to the top of the Eastern standings — stuck in neutral and eating their dust.
Bing Bong! pic.twitter.com/eLzNKBfFtD
— Detroit Pistons (@DetroitPistons) January 6, 2026
With two starters in street clothes — potential All-Star center Jalen Duren and steady veteran forward Tobias Harris — Detroit dismantled the visiting Knicks in a 121-90 pasting that further cemented the 27-9 Pistons’ standing atop the East. Cade Cunningham got wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, scoring or assisting on 61 points against a New York defense that struggled to stall dribble penetration or stay connected to shooters all night, allowing a Pistons team that ranks 26th in 3-pointers per game to drill 16 long balls on 31 attempts.
Deuce McBride, asked what he saw from the defense: “Man, did we play defense tonight?”
— Steve Popper (@StevePopper) January 6, 2026
The issues were arguably even more pronounced on the other end, where the ball pressure, physicality, length, quickness and tenacity of the Pistons’ No. 2-ranked defense completely short-circuited the Knicks’ attack. New York shot just 19-for-46 (41.3%) inside the 3-point arc, with a mere six makes inside the restricted area, and had a season-high-tying 20 turnovers, with six apiece coming from the All-NBA tandem of Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns. And while Brunson finished with a team-high 25 points, he also failed to register a single assist for the first time since March 2024 (a game in which he played just 47 seconds before leaving with a knee contusion) and for the first time in a full game since March 2022 — when he was still backing up Luka Dončić in Dallas.
The result: The Knicks posted an offensive rating of just 96.1 before garbage time, according to Cleaning the Glass — their second-worst offensive outing of the season. The chaser to that bitter shot? Their worst came three days earlier, in last Friday’s loss to the Hawks (95.1).
All of which is to say: The vibes surrounding the Knicks, so immaculate just three weeks ago when they hoisted the NBA Cup in Las Vegas, have taken a dramatic and dire turn during what’s now a four-game losing streak, the team’s longest since February 2024. And that downturn — which now has the Knicks looking up in the standings at not only the Pistons, but also the red-hot Celtics, and just a game and a half clear of fourth-place Toronto — is prompting the sort of look inward that sounds an awful lot like reaching DEFCON: Team Meeting. From Vincent Goodwill of ESPN:
“A lot needs to be addressed,” Knicks guard Jalen Brunson said.
Brunson declined to elaborate on precisely what he meant, but when asked if the members of the team had any discussions amongst themselves before the media was allowed in, he said, “Yeah, a little bit.” […]
“We just gotta respond. A lot more needs to be said. We keep it internal,” he said. “If we want to be the team we say we want to be, we have to be better, simple as that.”
And from Stefan Bondy of the New York Post:
“We’ve got to get to the drawing board,” Towns said. “We’ve got to figure it out. Offensively, defensively, we’ve got to figure it out. It just hasn’t been good basketball from us recently.” […]
“[The Pistons] were ready to go tonight. They wanted to play,” said Brunson […] “They truly wanted to win and we didn’t.”
And from James L. Edwards III of The Athletic:
“This is a bad, bad time,” [Towns] said. “You can’t have it be this bad.”
It’s been this bad for weeks now. At the time they won the NBA Cup, the Knicks were 18-7 with the NBA’s No. 2 offense, No. 13 defense and No. 3 net rating. Since the Cup win, though, they’re now 5-6, including four of their eight double-digit defeats on the season. In this span, they’ve plummeted down to 17th on offense and 27th on defense, getting outscored by a downright Wizardian 5.6 points per 100 possessions — and if there’s one thing we know, it’s that you never want to be downright Wizardian.
Not if you fancy yourself a title contender, anyway, which the Knicks very much do — an assessment made abundantly clear on Monday by none other than Knicks owner James L. Dolan, who, during a rare interview on New York radio station WFAN, laid out his expectation that his team would make the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. (Which, for the record, was right before Dolan took the franchise’s reins from his father. Y’know, in case you were wondering.)
“We want to get to the Finals, and we should win the Finals,” Dolan said. “This is sports […] anything can happen in sports. But getting to the Finals, we absolutely gotta do. Winning the Finals, we should win.”
After four straight losses punctuated by the most lopsided blowout defeat of their season, the Knicks feel awfully far away from that sort of rarefied air — and from the confidence, overflowing mere weeks ago, that they could get there. The question facing Mike Brown and his staff: How do they get that back?
Well, some reinforcements couldn’t hurt. The Knicks have gone 2-4 since losing Josh Hart, who was off to arguably the best start of his career, to a sprained right ankle on Christmas Day, and have been without reserve guard Landry Shamet (right shoulder sprain) since before Thanksgiving. Both could return to the fold by the end of the week, according to SNY’s Ian Begley, and both could provide welcome infusions in areas that have ailed the Knicks.
Hart gives head coach Mike Brown another dogged perimeter defender to ease the burdens on OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges — and to help insulate the vulnerable Brunson and Towns — while also offering a source of complementary ball-handling and playmaking, another physical rebounder for a team that’s been outrebounded in four of the last six games, and a jolt of grab-and-go offense in transition. Shamet, for his part, was shooting 42.4% from 3-point range before his injury while pairing with Deuce McBride as two of New York’s best point-of-attack defenders — a particular pain point for a Knicks team that’s given up blow-by after blow-by in recent weeks, a major factor in New York ranking 23rd in the NBA in the share of opponents’ shots that come at the rim over the last 11 games.
Brunson has been the culprit in plenty of those blow-bys. While opposing offenses, particularly those helmed by bigger and/or more athletic lead guards, have long hunted the smaller Brunson at the point of attack, the Knicks have largely come out ahead in the bargain by virtue of Brunson’s ability to consistently marshal an elite offense that dishes out at least as much punishment as it takes. But despite Brunson continuing to put up great numbers during New York’s post-Cup swoon — just under 30 points and six assists per game on 45/39/86 shooting splits — New York’s offense, on the whole, has dipped down below league-average over the past several weeks.
And while the offense has been markedly better in Brunson’s minutes than when he’s taken a seat, it’s still performed like a fringe-top-10 outfit with the captain on the ball rather than the league-best-caliber murderer’s row it was in his floor time earlier in the season. That’s not nearly effective enough to overcome the kind of defensive hemorrhaging the Knicks have been suffering with him on the floor — and a level of slippage that feels like, if not regression, at least a bit of reversion to old habits.
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Brunson’s usage rate, time of possession, seconds per touch and dribbles per touch are all up during this downturn fromwheretheywere earlier this season, and the Knicks are throwing about 16 fewer passes per game than they were earlier this season. Against the Pistons, Brunson ended 42.4% of the Knicks’ offensive possessions with a shot attempt, foul drawn or turnover — the kind of gargantuan usage that he’d begun to eschew during the Knicks’ hot start, and the kind of ball-dominant, isolation-heavy style of play from which Brown was brought in, in part, to steer New York’s offense away.
“We’re not getting off [the ball] like we were in the past,” Brown told reporters after the Detroit loss. “You’ve got to make quick decisions, and as soon as you feel another body come to you, you’ve got to get off it. And right now, we’re not doing it. We’re holding onto it too much, trying to force the issue too much. […] You’ve got to play off two feet, you’ve got to spray the basketball, and you’ve got to rely on your teammates to make decisions once you do spray it.”
On one hand, it’s difficult to blame Brunson for taking it upon himself to shoulder a heavier offensive burden when few, if any, of his teammates seem up to the task of dribbling through defensive pressure without losing the ball or generating and making shots against tight coverage. On the other, it’s an approach that can kickstart a vicious cycle: stagnant possessions begetting misses and turnovers that give opponents the opportunity to attack in transition against a Knicks defense that isn’t set, increasing the likelihood that they score, forcing New York to take the ball out and bring it up the floor against a defense that is set in the half-court, leading to stagnant possessions that beget misses and turnovers, and so on, and so on.
(It can become a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: Are Towns, Anunoby, Bridges, et al., struggling to catch a rhythm and make plays because they’re reduced to bystanders while Brunson’s trying to cook? Or is Brunson having to try to cook so much because they — most notably Towns, who has played well all-around this season, but has seen his touches and offensive production dip as he adjusts to a new system under Brown — are struggling to catch a rhythm and make plays?)
Those cycles can turn virtuous, too. More intentional attacking, quicker decisions and better ball/body movement can lead to better, more open shots (and, if defenders are scrambling and out of position, more offensive rebounding opportunities). Make those, and you get the chance to set your defense more often, giving you a better shot of getting the kind of stops that give you the chance to run and hunt early offense. String enough of those sorts of sequences together, and you’re on the front foot, acting as the aggressor and knocking the opposition back on its heels — playing to the win-the-possession-battle identity that the Knicks, at their best, wield like a weapon.
The bad news is the Knicks haven’t done much of that lately. The good news, Brown noted, is that they’ve done it before, and they’re capable of doing it again.
“It’s not time to panic,” Brown said Monday. “But we have to make sure we’re doing what we can do to help this group. And our guys have to bring it, or try to take it to another level as a group — not trying to do too much, but take it to another level as a group in a lot of areas.”
