NEW YORK — If it’s hard to believe Karl-Anthony Towns hasn’t scored a single, solitary point in any fourth quarter through three games of the 2026 NBA Finals, then the Knicks successfully blinded you with their 13-game playoff winning streak.

Because when the Knicks look good, the ball is hopping, bodies are moving, and the final box score resembles a team with more scoring options than it can handle.

And when the Knicks look bad, it looks like Game 3 of the NBA Finals, New York’s first loss in nearly a month and a half. It looks like Jalen Brunson playing hero ball and everyone else standing around watching.

“There were a lot of times where the decisions weren’t made quick last night. One guy caught, held, held, held, held, held. Now the defense settles in. Now you’re in trouble,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said after practice on Tuesday. “Making quick decisions while doing all those other things can help us out a lot, on top of me trying to help make sure that these guys are organized a little bit better.”

The lack of ball movement has been a constant for the Knicks when they’ve hit adversity this season: When they lost nine out of 11 games coming into the new year, when they fell into a 1-2 hole in their first-round playoff series against the Atlanta Hawks, and then Monday, when they recorded just 18 assists to San Antonio’s 28. Brunson, who averaged 19 shots a game from Game 4 of the first round through the four-game Eastern Conference finals sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers, attempted 31 shots in Game 1 of the NBA Finals and 25 shots apiece in Games 2 and 3. He is shooting 37% from the field, 31.8% from 3-point range and has a one-to-one assist-to-turnover ratio of 13 each. The Knicks have lost the Brunson minutes by an average of 5.2 points per 100 possessions through the first three games of the NBA Finals. Backup point guard Jose Alvarado has the second-highest net rating of all players in the Finals

“Most importantly, [I have to] not turn the ball over, give my team an opportunity,” said Brunson, before diagnosing his own play through the first three games. “Kind of in the middle. I’ve played better, but also I’ve played worse.”

A lack of ball movement remains central to the Knicks’ struggles, beginning with Brunson, who has held the ball 28 total minutes through the first three games of the series. For reference, Spurs guards Stephon Castle and De’Aaron Fox have a combined total time of possession of 31 minutes, according to data from the NBA’s stats page. No other Knicks player has held the ball longer than six minutes through the first three games, including Towns, who has six minutes of total time of possession.

“We’ve got to pick up the ball movement, for sure. We have to,” Towns said. “We have, what, 13 games in a row, 50 days of film to show what it looks like when we’re at our best. So we’ve got good film. We’ll get back to our fundamentals, what makes us great, what made us great, and get back to work tomorrow.”

As a result, the Knicks have ended up with shot attempts coming far too late in the shot clock. Nearly one of every five Knicks field goals (18.8%) have come with less than four seconds left on the shot clock, more than three times the number of late-clock “grenades” the Spurs have attempted in this playoff series. In Game 3, more than 21% of the Knicks’ shots came within a few ticks of the buzzer. And another 18% of their shots came with the shot clock sitting between seven and four seconds.

The Knicks are shooting 31% in both late-clock scenarios on the series.

“We’ve forced them to take a lot of shots at the end of clock. They’ve made a lot of those shots,” said Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson. “There’s some give and take there. I think we’ve shown that we can be impactful when we’re connected and doing it the right way.”

“If you’re playing 21, 22 seconds of great defense, they make a shot, tap ’em on the butt, good job. That’s where we want to live,” De’Aaron Fox added after Game 3 at the Garden. “We want to live in the area of them trying to take tough shots at the end of the shot clock. If they’re making them, so be it. Usually the numbers are in our favor if we’re getting them to play that deep into the shot clock.”

It boils down to excessive holding of the ball. Brown embraced a simple approach to snapping his team out of its stagnant offense.

“Just telling the guys the truth. Not just verbally, but doesn’t matter if it’s Jalen, KAT, OG (Anunoby), Mikal (Bridges), we’ll show them what we feel we need to show them on film,” Brown said. “Then we’ll walk through certain things to make sure that the spacing’s right, the timing’s right of our execution.”

It also falls on one of the Knicks’ longest-standing bad habits: forgetting their best player is an All-Star center who’s already outplayed Victor Wembanyama twice in the NBA Finals. Towns had 21 points on 8-of-12 shooting from the field in the Knicks’ Game 2 victory over the Spurs but took just 10 shots in the Game 3 loss.

“It’s extremely important that [Towns] is getting touches, that he’s involved, not just in the fourth quarter, but obviously throughout the ballgame,” Brown said. “I got to continue trying to do a better job of getting him involved throughout the course of the game, as well as late.”

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