After the Knicks escaped with a narrow win over what was left of Golden State’s roster on Sunday night, they could point to their record and take solace in another game being pushed to the left side of the standings and insist that is the goal.
But with 13 games left in the regular season, some of the recent wins and losses have raised more questions than they’ve answered.
Can the starting lineup play like a contender to begin a game? Is swapping out that lineup on the table? Is Mikal Bridges’ slump a temporary problem? Have they figured out an identity yet with the playoffs just a month away?
“I’ve said this many times: We never want to be a finished product,” Jalen Brunson said. “We never want to think you’re good enough at any point of the season. You always want to find ways to get better. There’s certain aspects of the game that each team goes through on a weekly basis or a game-by-game basis where things get better or things get worse, and you’ve got to make sure you’re the best teammate you can be completely. There’s always things to work on.”
Brunson has learned that lesson, having spent the season hearing from Mike Brown that he wants the team peaking in the postseason after spending three seasons with Tom Thibodeau, who repeated a mantra of the Knicks being at their best in the playoffs.
But setting that goal and achieving it is not only difficult, but where their job security lies. For all he achieved with the Knicks, Thibodeau didn’t get to the NBA Finals, let alone win a championship, and that seemed to be all that would have protected him in the end. Brown arrived at Madison Square Garden saddled with the pressure of a championship-or-bust expectation.
It’s hard to say the Knicks (44-25) are any different from what they were a year ago.
Last season, after making major moves to revamp the roster and go all-in with Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns, the Knicks had to figure out if they were up to the task of matching the fire and fun that the previous version of the team had put on display.
While we remember the result, reaching the Eastern Conference finals for the first time in a quarter-century, we forget the process. There were voices in the organization pushing Thibodeau out throughout the season.
The Knicks were unable to beat any of the top teams in the NBA in the regular season, but in the end, the players did what they had done the season before the changes: stage dramatic comebacks and captivate the city.
Lesson learned? Well, hard to say. They are falling into the same holes, now trying most of all to figure out why they seem to start every game as if they hadn’t met each other before. They also seem to have forgotten every lesson about how physicality helped spur a defensive turnaround in the last two months.
“I mean we’re just not playing as aggressive, as physical, as we do when we’re down,” Towns said. “It’s a little bit like the recipe we played with last year. We played with fire a lot. We just always came out on the other side unscathed. Down 20 in the playoffs and found ourselves winning those games.
“Like I said last year and I’ll say it again, that’s not a recipe for success. But it’s great when you know you can do that. The game’s never too out of hand for us to have confidence we can win the game.
“Yeah, we’re playing with fire. Even [Sunday night], all of you all were sitting in media row like, ‘they’re going to get whupped up tonight,’ especially when you see 21 points they’re up . . . I mean, it looked bad. It looked bad in Utah, too.
“Like I said, it’s not a recipe for success. This is not something to be proud of. But this is something that, I said it last year, inexpensive expensive lesson. It’s expensive that you had to work so much harder to get the win, but it’s inexpensive [because] it didn’t cost us anything. We got the win. That’s the only thing that really matters at the end of the day.”
Actually, a three-point win over a Golden State squad missing nearly every player you could name doesn’t mean a whole lot. What the Knicks have learned is that the wins that count, the ones that will let them know if they got the answers right this time, haven’t come yet.
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.