Something is very wrong with Knicks
Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns of the New York Knicks in the fourth quarter against the Dallas Mavericks at Madison Square Garden on Monday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The boos were raining down loudly and deservedly at Madison Square Garden. But if you listened closely, you’d swear you could hear the cacophonous laugh of Tom Thibodeau in the distance.
When the Knicks fired Thibodeau in the wake of the loss to the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals, the edict was clear. There was another level to reach for the team.
But they couldn’t have imagined it was the level they hit Monday night against a skeleton-crew version of the Dallas Mavericks. They fell behind by 30 in the first half and were humiliated wire-to-wire in a 114-97 loss.
The task for Mike Brown is to lift the Knicks to the NBA Finals. So how to explain what the Knicks put on display?
They were embarrassed with Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan seated in his usual front-row seat two weeks after going on the radio and saying, “We want to get to the Finals. And we should win the Finals. This is sports and anything can happen. But getting to the Finals we absolutely got to do. Winning the Finals, we should win.”
He might have had good reason to believe it at that time, but hours after that interview, the Knicks were destroyed by the Detroit Pistons. That was their fourth straight loss, and now they have lost nine of their last 11 games in dropping to 25-18. They were 29th in the NBA in defensive rating in the last 10 games before Monday.
Dolan’s close-up view ended after halftime as he did not return to his seat. That’s usually an ominous sign of a shake-up.
“They scored 75 points in the first half,” Brown said. “Halftime, we usually do the clips and talk about technical X’s-and-O’s and all that crap that coaches do, teams do. There was nothing to be said at halftime. Except for lock in and . . . do your job.”
The thing is, even if the Knicks had won this game by 30, it might not have done anything to quell the troubles that have been brewing for some time. The defense has been abysmal. The effort has been questioned even by Brown. The Knicks have talked, rightly, about Karl-Anthony Towns’ failure to get back on defense in Sacramento and Mikal Bridges not hustling to retrieve a loose ball in the final seconds in Phoenix.
But getting hammered by the first-place Pistons is one thing. Three games ago, Brown called the loss in Sacramento the worst of the season. But this? Falling behind by 30 against an 18-26 Mavericks squad missing — take a deep breath, this is going to take a while — Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving, PJ Washington, Dante Exum, D’Angelo Russell, Dereck Lively and Daniel Gafford is much harder to explain away.
The front office made moves to create an imposing starting lineup, but under Brown, the pieces just haven’t worked.
“There’s been a lot of things to pinpoint,” Jalen Brunson said. “But as a team, we know what we have to do. Either we do it, we care enough to do it, or we don’t.”
“It doesn’t matter when. It matters that it did happen,” Towns said. “So we’ve got to figure it out. And we have a special team and we’ve got a special opportunity and we can’t just let it go to waste.”
Towns and OG Anunoby were scoreless in the first quarter and the Knicks entered halftime serenaded by boos with a 28-point deficit after allowing 44 points in the second quarter.
Towns has been visibly frustrated much of the season and the franchise seems to be frustrated with him. That includes the fan base, as he exited to boos with 4:52 remaining and returned to boos just 29 seconds later after Mitchell Robinson picked up a pair of quick fouls.
Whispers around the league have begun to speculate about the possibility of the Knicks moving him. (According to one league source, the Knicks have not shopped Towns or brought him up with any teams.) His name surfaced when the Bucks and Knicks discussed the chance of a deal involving Giannis Antetokounmpo, but now league sources said talks have involved other teams, including Memphis, Orlando and Charlotte.
Towns is a five-time All-Star, and any of these deals outside of Antetokounmpo likely would mean a downgrade in talent. But with the influx of talent, the Knicks have lost something.
Could it get better by the time it really matters? Really, the only thing that matters is if the Knicks get deeper into the postseason than they did last season, when they reached the conference finals for the first time in a quarter-century. A month-long struggle would be forgotten if the Knicks could get through the Eastern Conference and into the NBA Finals.
The Knicks’ front office has made major moves during the last two years, but they always came when the team was on the rise. With the boos filling the Garden and the losses piling up, the question is: Will they wait for good times to return before making the next major move?
“At the end of the day, that’s the guys that have this jersey on,” Josh Hart said. “We have to go out there with a sense of urgency. At this point, 40 games in, normally you don’t put too much into struggles, because there’s highs and lows, but at this point we have to play desperate, because that’s what we 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.
