Bullied Knicks need to toughen up; it could happen with trade or Josh Hart's return

 PHOENIX

When the Knicks boarded the plane for this four-game western trip Thursday afternoon, they were exactly four weeks from the NBA trade deadline. And maybe that’s not enough time to determine whether they need to make a move or not.

Something has been missing. Maybe it’s just Josh Hart, who sat out his eighth straight game Friday night, when the Knicks lost for the fifth time in their last six games. They already changed the coach in the summer. They also have swung major deals and signed players in the summer to reach the edge of the salary cap’s second apron, tightly restricting what they can do.

On Friday night, front office leadership as well as ownership were seated courtside as the Suns not only won the game but for much of the night won the fight, playing physically and bullying the Knicks. It’s a tactic that the Detroit Pistons employed Monday in a one-sided win and Orlando repeatedly has utilized.

The Knicks are talented, but are they missing something? Last season, they added hard-nosed P.J. Tucker to the locker room to try to address this issue, but he was a non-factor on the court and never had the impact that the team hoped.

“Yeah, we told our guys, hey, look, they’re going to be up in you,” coach Mike Brown said after Friday’s loss. “They’re going to try to be physical with you. That’s the way they play. They’ve done a good job with it. We fell into the way that they played and even got frustrated, picking up a couple of offensive fouls. We have to do a better job with it instead of letting them dictate what’s going on on the floor.”

Jalen Brunson is the smallest player in the Knicks’ starting lineup, but at times he seemed to be the only one willing to shove back when the likes of Dillon Brooks was trying to physically knock him off his game. Afterward, he said, “They play physical basketball, but so do we. And we need to.”

The return of Hart, who was upgraded to questionable, could come as soon as Sunday in Portland. His combustible energy on the floor could solve some of the issues. And he and Landry Shamet, who is recovering from a shoulder injury — perhaps not coincidentally suffered from a hard screen set by Orlando’s Wendell Carter Jr. — certainly could improve the defense.

Brunson went into the Knicks’ issues more deeply on his podcast with Hart, The Roommates Show, and expressed a belief in the roster — but he also acknowledged what the team has shown of late.

“I’m going to keep it real. We look godawful,” Brunson said in the most recent episode that came before the Knicks broke the four-game losing streak with a win over the Clippers. “And how do I say this? The worst part about it, it’s all correctable stuff . . . And I think that’s what makes it most frustrating is like we have the ability to correct it. It should have been corrected a long time ago.

“ . . . Obviously, our communication on both sides of the ball. One, physicality on both sides of the ball. I think it’s more mental than anything. Like we have the pieces and we’ve shown that we can be physical on both sides of the ball this season. Like it’s not like we’re like brand-new. We’ve adjusted. We’ve gotten better earlier in the season. We’re obviously taking steps back, but we had the ability to do great things as a team and I think we’ve shown that so far. It’s just a rough patch.

“It’s not fun. It’s something you don’t want to go through as a team. You don’t want to be in this position, but we got to claw our way out of it somehow. You can’t just sulk and be feeling sorry for ourselves. That’s just going to make us worse.”

So is there a move to be made? Could the Knicks swing a deal packaging a handful of second-round picks along with Guerschon Yabusele or Pacome Dadiet to pick up a player such as scrappy New Orleans guard Jose Alvarado (although finding toughness in a 6-foot-tall package already is what the Knicks have), Sacramento’s Keon Ellis or some other player available from a team heading to the lottery?

The Knicks now have less than four weeks to decide.

The Robinson question

The biggest part of the trade deadline situation is that the Knicks have shown that they need Mitchell Robinson for his defense, rebounding, energy and effort. But he also is the biggest question mark with an expiring contract and no easy solution to what comes next.

Signing him back in the summer will be costly and push the Knicks beyond the second apron unless they can maneuver elsewhere to cut salary. If they let him walk, they lose a valuable asset for nothing.

It’s something that the Leon Rose-led front office has not done: lose a piece of value for no return. They have either signed the player or dealt him before he can walk.

Asked about it Friday, Robinson maintained the same stance he has all season.

“I tell you this every time, brother,” he said. “ . . . I let my agent handle that. That’s what you got an agent for. Let them do their [job]. Just continue to play hard.”

Practice makes, well, a little better

With the NBA Cup added to their schedule, the Knicks have had little time for a real practice. They were able to get one in after the four-game losing streak, and after Friday’s loss, they remained in Phoenix and held a shortened version before flying to Portland.

“It helped a lot,” Brown said. “When we got together, it wasn’t really practice practice, at least practice how I like it. But any time you can get your group together and review whatever your principles are, whatever your offensive stuff is, whatever your defensive stuff is, and then watching tape on the previous opponent to see where you can get a little better and also where you’re doing things fine.

“Any time you can do that, it’s good. And it was good for us to do for sure.”

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.