Shorthanded Knicks trying to survive as injuries mount

The Knicks’ team plane took off for Milwaukee with 10 games left in the schedule and a few open seats.

This may be causing painful memories for the Knicks and their fan base, recalling the procession of players lost to injuries last season. They barely could field a team by Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals, and their season came to a disappointing ending.

But even as the injuries are piling up, none of them are thought to be long-term problems. Instead, it’s just enough to make this final stretch shaky as they try to hold their spot in the playoff race.

While trying to hang on to the third seed in the Eastern Conference, a position they’ve held all season long (they did clinch a playoff spot when the Hawks lost on Thursday), the first goal right now is simply survival.

When Cam Payne sprained an ankle in the opening minutes of Wednesday night’s loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, he tried to play on and managed to survive until halftime, when the Knicks’ medical team informed the coaching staff that he was done for the night.

That put him third in line among the injured point guards — joining Jalen Brunson, who has missed the last 10 games and is coming up on a reevaluation Friday, and Deuce McBride, who has missed three games with a groin strain.

Now, as they ready to face the Bucks, they do it with uncertainty about who will be manning the position. All three point guards already have been ruled out for the game.

“Next man up,” Karl-Anthony Towns said. “This team has fought adversity a lot, so it’s next man up. I told y’all before, we’ve got a locker room full of guys who are extremely talented and have great character, and we believe in every single one of these guys in the locker room stepping into the game and making an impact.”

Desperate times, desperate measures is the common refrain, but for the Knicks, it’s always some variation of next man up, and that’s what they were clinging to after the latest injury.

“Yeah, just next guy get in there,” coach Tom Thibodeau said. “So I thought Tyler [Kolek] played well in the first half. And then Delon [Wright], who’s the next guy, get in and get the job done. That’s a big part of your approach, your team’s approach. So I think there’s going to be adversity. You have to be mentally tough. You have to be able to get through that. You have to stay disciplined.”

Kolek is a rookie who for most of the season was rarely seen in more than pregame warmups. That’s when he would mostly serve as a caddie, making sure the players getting playing time got all the shots up that they needed.

Then there’s the even-lesser-used Wright, who has played 36 minutes for the Knicks, 12 of them coming when he played the entire fourth quarter Wednesday.

“Oh, yeah, everybody started messing with me, like, ‘Oh, you’re going to have to play today,’ ” Wright said. “So you never want to see a guy go down, but you know how the NBA is, next-guy mentality. Just got to be ready. Got my trainer here to work me out the past few days. So things just worked out.”

They didn’t work out for the Knicks on Wednesday, so they are 5-5 without Brunson and have yet to beat a team with a winning record in that span.

The Bucks have their own issues, having fallen into sixth place — which would set up a first-round matchup with the Knicks as long as the two hold their spots — and are without Damian Lillard, who was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis as the medical staff found a blood clot in his calf. He has begun a blood-thinner regimen with no return date set.

Giannis Antetokounmpo was sidelined Wednesday with a foot sprain that the team hopes is a one-game absence, but they also are missing former Knicks center Jericho Sims, who is out for the season, and Bobby Portis still has six games left on his 25-game suspension.

The Knicks have no sympathy for Milwaukee, just as the rest of the league has no sympathy for them. They’re focused on their push to the finish.

“Of course you want to move up in the standings,” Towns said. “You never want to move backwards. One: It’s important for standings just to be able to have that seed but two: We want to end the season winning. We want to be in a good spot and feeling good about our games and as a team feeling good about us. So it’s important these last 10 that we ramp up and get ourselves ready for the next step.”

Just step carefully.

It’s that time of the year.

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.