Jalen Brunson’s rebound performance trend good to Knicks heading to Game 2

The problem with having the kind of season Jalen Brunson had is that excellence becomes expected. Remarkable becomes routine.

Prodigious becomes par-for-the-course.

And when you toss in the occasional stinker?

Well, it sticks out. It’s like wearing a tie-dyed cummerbund with a tuxedo. It’s like wearing a pair of Puma Clydes with an evening gown. It’s hard to miss.

Brunson missed a lot Saturday night, Game 1 of the playoffs with the 76ers.

He missed 18 out of 26 shots. He missed five out of six 3s. He even missed a technical free throw. But it wasn’t just his shooting that was off. He had five turnovers and was picked clean of the ball twice. He had a tough night guarding anyone.

“I’ve got to go back to the drawing board,” Brunson said, “and be better.”

Here’s the thing though. Brunson has a habit of taking his own words literally. On those rare occasions this year when he’s been at less-than-MVP level, he has generally responded with the kind of ferocious and resilient bounce-back that helps explain so much of his improbable emergence as one of the league’s best players.

Go back to the beginning: Brunson had a rough game in the season opener against the Celtics at Madison Square Garden, a 108-104 loss where he shot 6-for-21 and was generally manhandled by Boston’s guards; two nights later in Atlanta he drained a career-high eight 3s as the Knicks trounced the Hawks and were off on their merry way.

Then there was Dec. 15. Two nights earlier, the Knicks had lost a dispiriting game in Salt Lake City to the Jazz and Brunson had scuffled, missing 13 shots and missing five free throws. But in Phoenix, playing against the full-strength Suns, Brunson helped engineer the Knicks’ first signature win of the season, a 139-122 beating in which he went 9-for-9 from 3, scored 50 (35 in the second half), added nine assists and five steals.

That moved Kevin Durant to marvel afterward: “That’s his franchise.

And he’s going to be a Hall of Fame player by the end of his career the way he’s playing out there.”

So, yes. Brunson is nothing if not resilient. And even less than an hour after Game 1 he was already plotting how to make things right for Game 2 Monday night at the Garden.

“I give them a lot of credit,” Brunson said of the Sixers and their Stop-Jalen game plan that they worked to near perfection. “I’ve got to be a lot better, speed up and tell myself to slow down a little bit. Got to give them a lot of credit, but I made a couple of key plays where my teammates made big shots, but it’s credit to them and they played well today.”

The Knicks, as a rule, are not a team that needs to be given periodic reminders about taking care of business. But it behooves them to take care of business Monday anyhow. The Sixers came here needing only to steal one at the Garden, and they came damn close Saturday.

And if the Knicks might’ve been heartened to see that they could still win with Brunson delivering a C-plus game, Philly had to be encouraged to see that they went step-for-step with the Knicks with Joel Embiid barely able to jump over the lines on the court.

The Knicks’ chronic habit of squandering best-of-seven Game 1s at home is well-chronicled; before Saturday they’d lost their previous three (last year, Miami; 2021, Atlanta; 2013, Indiana) and in their history have always — always — lost series when they did that, including Indiana 1995, Chicago in 1989 and Boston in 1969.

Curiously, in their history, they’ve only twice lost Game 2 at home in a seven-game series after winning Game 1, and both times — Atlanta in the conference semifinals in 1971 and Los Angeles in the NBA Finals in 1970 — they came back to win the series, beating the Hawks in five and the Lakers, rather famously, in seven.

But that kind of history is like the guy at the bar who, after a couple of warm-up bourbons, can rattle off all of the coincidences in the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations: interesting, but not terribly relevant and useful information. For the Knicks, this is relevant: Life is a lot less complicated for them if they show up in Philly on Thursday with a 2-0 lead in this series.