Knicks bench Mikal Bridges in Game 3 loss to Hawks: ‘We have to look at everything’

At least Mikal Bridges gets a few days out of New York.

In a 109-108 loss to the Atlanta Hawks in Game 3 of their first-round playoff series, the Knicks wing posted a stat line — a 0-1-2 (or zero points, one rebound and two assists) with four turnovers — that will live in infamy if his team cannot come back from a 2-1 deficit in the best-of-seven set. Heck, they might name a 0-1-2 after him.

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It’s hard for Bridges to make so little impact in 20 minutes of a high-stakes playoff game, if only because we know how talented he is. He averaged 14.4 points (on 49/37/83 shooting splits), 3.8 rebounds and 3.7 assists (against just one turnover) per game in the regular season. Through the first two games of this series, a 1-1 split in Madison Square Garden, his scoring average was down to 10.5 points (on 42/30/100).

But things went from worse to abominable on Thursday, when he missed all three of his shot attempts — a pair of corner 3-pointers and a wide-open 12-foot turnaround. He did not attempt a shot after the five-minute mark of the second quarter. Worse: He somehow finished -26 over 20 minutes of a game the Knicks lost by a single point.

To be fair, he only played five minutes of the second half. He sat on the bench for the final 9:48 of the third quarter, returned for the start of the fourth, only to be benched again at the 9:25 mark of the final frame. He did return as a defensive specialist for Atlanta’s final possession — a play that ended in CJ McCollum’s game-winning shot.

It bears mentioning again: In a game in which Karl-Anthony Towns and Deuce McBride finished +22 and +16, respectively, Bridges was -26. That last bit, about McBride, led to a postgame question for Knicks head coach Mike Brown: Would he consider replacing Bridges with McBride in the starting lineup moving forward?

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“I mean, I’m not even thinking about that right now, you know?” said Brown, whose team plays Game 4 in Atlanta on Saturday. “But, in the same breath, I’ve said it before, like you said: We have to look at everything. But I’m thinking still about the game and what we could have done…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/knicks-bench-mikal-bridges-in-game-3-loss-to-hawks-we-have-to-look-at-everything-050204768.html

Author : Ben Rohrbach

Publish date : 2026-04-24 05:02:00

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