Knicks find themselves on road to nowhere as trip has them playing in three time zones

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In the Knicks’ locker room at the Frost Center late Wednesday night, players were talking among themselves about what had hit them — a disastrous performance on their part paired with a “night of his life” by a player they could barely identify whose name they could barely pronounce.

This may seem like the time of the season for these kind of nights, when lottery-bound teams like the San Antonio Spurs are mixing together lineups and with the Knicks in the grind of an arduous travel schedule, someone like Sandro Mamukelashvili emerges with the night of his career.

But even as they seem locked into third place in the Eastern Conference with only 14 games remaining and a four-game lead on the fourth-place Indiana Pacers, the Knicks tried to avoid the excuses and instead turn their attention to atoning for the 120-105 loss to the Spurs as they headed to the second night of a back-to-back set against the Hornets.

“I think these are some more important days,” Deuce McBride said. “Honestly, I feel like if you’ve played in the playoffs before, I feel like these are the times where guys are really trying to tune up even more and these games become even more important, whether you’re looking at trying to get in the playoffs or get a better seeding. So I feel like these are games we’re trying to tune up and get ready and I feel we didn’t show that [Wednesday].”

McBride was listed as questionable with a groin contusion suffered Wednesday, but after warming up, he was cleared to play, backing up his desire to get time on the court now.

The Knicks came out flat defensively, allowing the shorthanded Spurs to score at will, and on that end, little changed much of the night. Mamukelashvili became the first player in NBA history to score 34 or more points while playing less than 20 minutes.

Offensively, after Karl-Anthony Towns hit his — and the team’s — first four shots, the Knicks missed 15 straight shots. The four starters alongside Towns missed their first 20 attempts.

So was that a product of a 12-day West Coast trip followed by a cross-country flight home for one game and then back to a time-zone switch in Texas with another game Thursday in Charlotte? That’s a stretch of seven of eight games on the road in three different time zones.

The Knicks do have work to do in this final stretch, even if their place in the standings doesn’t change. They are waiting for the return of Jalen Brunson, who has missed the last seven games, and still are trying to find consistency before the playoffs. And even if they don’t want to excuse performances like Wednesday night’s, it’s worth conceding that it is a grind.

“Obviously, we’ve had a tough schedule the last couple weeks,” Josh Hart said. “Going on the road for a week and a half. And then go home and go right into a back-to-back where we lose an hour. So we knew it was going to be tough.

“You already know the biggest thing about the NBA is the travel. That’s the toughest thing. And when it’s the dog days of the season and you already know your body is going to be tired, you’ve got to keep going and you’ve got to find it mentally. It’s a little bit draining mentally, but we know we’ve got to make sure we regroup.

“We got another tough one [Thursday] with a team that plays extremely fast. We go on a back-to-back and we lose an hour. We’ve got certain things against us schedule-wise, so we’ve got to make sure we pick it up.”

By Steve Popper

steve.popper@newsday.com@StevePopper

Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.