Can the Knicks now notch a win over a top NBA team?
Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns against the Toronto Raptors at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
You ask Karl-Anthony Towns about the upcoming rematch with Oklahoma City and the Knicks' struggles against the top teams in the NBA this season, and he immediately starts listing some of their more impressive victories. But when it’s pointed out that the Knicks (25-13) are 0-4 against the top two teams in each conference, he laughs.
“Damn, we moving the posts like that,” Towns said incredulously. “We’re in third.”
It’s true, the Knicks are in third place and have done nothing to change the thinking that they have put together a championship-contending team this season. But with theThunder visiting Madison Square Garden on Friday night, it’s worth mentioning that the loss in Oklahoma City last week left them winless against Cleveland, Boston, OKC and Houston.
It’s game 39 for the Knicks, a franchise that repeats the mantra of being at its best at the end of the season. Still, a win over one of these teams would make that championship-contender status more than just talk.
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“I think we are playing good basketball,” Towns said. “Unfortunately, there has to be a winner and loser in every game. I think that OKC and Chicago, those two games, it shows the level we can play at against anybody.
“Obviously, you have to sustain it for 48 minutes, but when you look at those games and you watch the film, you really like what you see from this team. Not only from the physical aspect of our talent and putting the ball in the basket but just the vibes and the mentality. There are a lot of good things, but we have to find a way for 48 minutes and we are blessed, still early in the regular season, where we still have a lot of time to figure it out.”
The 48 minutes was the thing that maybe set this in motion. The Knicks put on a show for much of the night last week in Oklahoma City, building a 14-point lead on the Thunder and then seeing it fall apart, raising questions about fatigue and depth. With the bench thinned out by the absence of Deuce McBride for five straight games with a hamstring injury and Mitchell Robinson's return still an unknown, plus tweaks to starters Jalen Brunson (calf) and Towns (knee), It’s a legitimate concern.
The Knicks faded that night, and maybe if they had hung on, it would have created a different aura around the current team. The Thunder (30-6) followed that up by doing the same thing to the Celtics, turning a double-digit deficit into a one-sided win two days later for a 15th straight victory — a streak that finally came to an end in Cleveland on Wednesday.
“We’ve got to approach that like we just approached it, like we approach every game,” Josh Hart said. “We’re not playing a championship game on January 10th. That’s one of the best if not the best teams in the league with someone who might be the MVP. So we’ve got to go out there with energy.
“I learned that we should have executed better down the stretch. We’ve got to get Jalen off the ball a little more. You’ve got a physical guy like Lu Dort picking him up 94 feet. We’re having him exert a lot of energy just getting the ball across half-court. We’ve got to make sure we’re looking out for each other, make sure we’re executing at a high level. I think we built a 12- or 14-point lead at one point, so got to continue when we have things like that to bury teams and not keep the door open.”
You could look at that late-game collapse in Oklahoma City as a reality against a very good team in a hostile environment, but the Knicks saw it carry over to a loss in Chicago the next night and a flat effort against Orlando at home, sending them to their first three-game losing streak of the season and wiping out the memory of the nine-game winning streak that preceded it.
With Wednesday's win, even though it was over the struggling Toronto Raptors, the Knicks seemed back on track, on the court and, maybe just as important, in the locker room. After moaning about effort and energy just two days earlier, the Knicks were shouting jokes across the locker room after Wednesday's game. While Brunson would coach-speak it as “it’s a big game because it’s our next game,” there was little doubt that the memory of the losses was fresh and the mood was back where it was before.
“We’ve got a great group of guys and they work at it,” coach Tom Thibodeau said. “Over the course of the season, sometimes you’re going to stumble. You’ve got to get back up, you’ve got to refocus. We went through a rough stretch on the road, [so] lock into the recovery. Do that and just find a way to win. I think that’s a big part of growing and learning. I thought the first thing is just don’t get down. Just get more determined. I think a big part of mental toughness is having the belief you can do things better. If we lock into that, good things will come from that."
The goalposts for the Knicks may be set somewhere in the distance, the star-studded starting lineup put together with an eye on moving past the Eastern Conference semifinals, where the last two seasons have ended. But on Jan. 10, it’s right here, at Madison Square Garden and a chance to show they are where these top teams are right now
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.
