Late Monday night, when the questions stopped and the cameras turned off, Josh Hart remained in his seat at the podium for a few moments. 

He’d just answered a few questions about the Knicks’ brutal Game 2 loss. 

Normally, players get up and head home after their postgame interviews, but Hart stared straight ahead with a look of frustration and bewilderment that reflected the magnitude of what just happened on the court. 

The No. 3 seeded Knicks -- a team with a mandate to reach the NBA Finals -- coughed up a winnable game at MSG.

Questionable lineups, poor fourth-quarter offense and an inability to stop CJ McCollum left the Knicks searching for answers late Monday night. 

They now head to Atlanta with their first-round series tied, 1-1. 

The odds tell you they’ll probably make it through this series and advance to play the Celtics in the second round, but by coughing up a double-digit fourth quarter lead on Monday, the Knicks made life much harder than it had to be.

Mike Brown sat both Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns at the same time for stretches in both halves on Monday. The Knicks were outscored by seven points when Brunson and Towns were off the floor. 

As Knicks Film School’s Ben Ritholtz pointed out, the Knicks’ net rating in the regular season when Towns and Brunson were off the floor wasn’t pretty.

Brown didn’t think that the lineups without Brunson and Towns led to the Knicks’ downfall. 

“I don’t think so. We’ve played that lineup quite a bit since the end of the season, that lineup’s been pretty good,” Brown said. “We weren’t good tonight and we turned the ball over a few too many times during that period. We had opportunities with our starters where we were up eight to 10 and Atlanta closed it so I wouldn’t just say that specific lineup caused it.”

To Brown’s point, the Knicks led by nine in the fourth quarter when Brunson and Towns returned to the court. There were eight minutes left in regulation. This is a game the Knicks should have won.

Brown called a timeout with 2:43 remaining in the game and Brunson dribbling to the basket. Brunson didn’t have a clean look so you can’t say that Brown’s timeout directly prevented the Knicks from scoring, but it was strange to see Brunson stopped mid-dribble by the timeout. 

“We had a couple of possessions weren’t fluid so I wanted to make sure that we had something that we wanted to get to or set something up offensively because we had whiffed on the last couple of possessions,” Brown said. “They just didn’t look right or didn’t feel right.”

At that point, the Knicks led by just one and had been outscored, 10-4, over the past five minutes.

Brown did not have a timeout to use on the Knicks’ final possession, which ended with a Mikal Bridges miss.  

Brunson finished the game 10-for-26 and went 3-for-8 in the last eight minutes of the fourth quarter. 

In that same span, Towns took just two shots. 

“The opportunity just didn’t come around to shoot it,” Towns said when asked about the fourth quarter. “But at the end of the day I trust everyone in this locker room to shoot it. The opportunity wasn’t there for me in the fourth. And that’s fine. These guys, they work on their games, I know they can shoot it.”

When Hart was asked about Towns in the fourth quarter, he made it clear that it would be one of several things the Knicks would look at ahead of Game 3. 

“We have to make sure he’s more involved, find him on mismatches. Put him in action and make sure we use his skill and his gravity to our advantage,” he said. “That’s something we will look at film and be better with.”