Zach Lowe

I don't know if Mike Brown saying, hey, I'm not going to bring you off the bench.

I'm just going to keep starting you.

Keep guarding Tyrese Maxey.

Let your defense for your offense.

But step one is there.

This is a completely different player than the player who started the playoffs against Atlanta.

And thing number two is.

Foul trouble aside, this is the Karl-Anthony Towns that you want to see.

Offensively, we know what he can do.

It's not a shock that he's passing like this.

He's always been a good passer, particularly when he stops trying to be too tricky with it.

The shooting is the shooting.

I thought Mike Brown's game plan in this series was pretty flawless right from the jump, and the centerpiece of it was, if you're gifting us Joel Embiid on Karl-Anthony Towns, and you're going to be maybe too slow or too reluctant to put him anywhere else,

we're just going to milk that for all it's worth.

And we're going to make Joel Embiid's life absolutely miserable and wear him down to the point that between that and the, you know, ankle and the adductor and all the stuff that happened at the beginning of the series that crippled him, he was just a shade of himself defensively and on the glass.

But, but it's not just that it's, and you wrote about this at the end of last season.

All I want from cat defensively is a try to,

check and b do the thing that you are supposed to do so when these two players run a pick and roll this is your job you have to understand that it's your job because the other four players on the team are going to behave based on you doing that job and if you do something else or you don't execute it we're all going to fuck up because we're expecting you to do the thing

He's never going to be a great defensive player.

I think he's actually been quite good in the playoffs, but he's doing that.