The most important detail from New York's Game 2 loss was not the final miss. It was the target.

Atlanta won 107-106 and tied the series, but the larger message was in who the Hawks seemed comfortable pulling into the action. When CJ McCollum has a 32-point night and the postgame tone points back to Jalen Brunson as the defender being hunted, that is no longer random playoff noise. That is a map.

This is what makes the problem so awkward for the Knicks. Brunson is still the player who carried 29 points in Game 2. He is still the guard whose late-game résumé helped define New York's fourth quarters all season, and he won Clutch Player of the Year last season for a reason. But those facts do not cancel out the other one. If Atlanta believes Brunson is the weak point it can reach whenever possessions get tense, the Knicks are being forced to solve two games at once.

One game is the one with the ball, where Brunson remains central. The other is the one without it, where every switch, screen and scramble can become a question about how much help New York has to send and what that help costs somewhere else.

That is why this feels bigger than shotmaking. Teams can survive an off shooting night. It is harder to survive becoming predictable prey. Once an opponent decides it likes a matchup, the entire defense starts tilting toward protection. Rotations arrive earlier. Bigger defenders get pulled away from other jobs. The lineup starts solving for one man instead of five.

New York can try to hide Brunson better. It almost has to. But there is no clean version of that against a playoff opponent that now appears eager to call for him on purpose. Every extra layer of protection risks distorting the Knicks' offense, because the players best equipped to cover for him are also the players New York needs doing other work.

That is the pressure point now. Not whether Brunson can score enough. He usually can. It is whether the Knicks can keep him at the center of their offense without letting Atlanta keep making him the center of its own.