Knicks vow to fix ball movement woes after falling into Rockets’ Dillon Brooks trap

HOUSTON — The movement stopped. All the cuts and motion from three nights prior in Detroit had disappeared against the Rockets, who stuck professional agitator Dillon Brooks on Karl-Anthony Towns and threw a curveball that the Knicks chased way out of the zone.

“We can’t just try to consistently chase the mismatch,” Josh Hart said after the Knicks lost Monday night to the Rockets, 109-97. “We’ve got to get more movement into it. Even when we got the mismatch we wanted, it was very stagnant. And then we’re just going against a loaded defense. Then it’s tough to offensive rebound, tough to do stuff like that. I think we were decent. We probably complained a little bit too much [to the referees], let that take us out of the game. We’ve just got to learn from it and build off of it.”

The supposed mismatch — a 7-foot Towns against a 6-6 Brooks — didn’t make hay. Towns scored just 17 on 7-for-17 shooting with zero 3-pointers.

He dealt with foul trouble, totaled just two points on five post-ups despite the size advantage and the Knicks were outscored by 26 points in his 32 minutes.

If anything, the Rockets took advantage of the matchup as the Knicks offense turned into a series of difficult shots against a physical opponent.

Hart, to his credit, didn’t want to make excuses about the officiating, even after coach Tom Thibodeau was clearly peeved by the calls in his separate postgame interviews.