The real season for the Knicks, one that’s seen the Cavs blow past them at a time when the Knicks were supposed to be setting themselves up to knock off the Celtics, begins in less than three weeks when the playoffs begin. Everything else between now and then, even when Jalen Brunson is back on the floor, is just noise, mostly about whether a team that added Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges is good enough to finally make it past the second round. Provided the Knick can get that far.
There is also the opportunity, in April and hopefully into May, for this year’s version of the Knicks to get people to love them as much as they did last year’s version, all the way to Game 7 against the Pacers at Madison Square Garden, at which point the Knicks began limping toward next year while everybody in a Pacers uniform picked that Sunday afternoon to turn into Steph Curry.
We know the Knicks are set up to win more games than they did last season. We know they are actually closer now in the standings to the Celtics than they were at the end of last season, one that got their fans believing their team could knock the Celtics off if they made it to the Conference Finals.
But we also know this:
The Knicks are now 13 games behind the Cavaliers after getting rolled by them in Cleveland on Wednesday night; after getting outscored 71-45 in the second half on the back end of a back-to-back; after seeing their record fall to 8-6 in games when they didn’t have Brunson, their star. By now even people in outer space know that the Knicks have played six games in this regular season against Boston and Cleveland and been unable to get a single game off either one of them.
And, despite whatever combination of reasons and excuses and injured players can be factored into the whole grand cockeyed scheme of things, here is the bottom line on those six games: The Knicks have lost three to the Cavaliers by a total of 62 points. They have lost three to the Celtics by a total of 63 points. It’s kind of a lot.
“It’s 0-0 when you get [to the playoffs],” Towns was quoted as saying in Cleveland Wednesday night.
It is. That is when another 50-win Knicks team (after what feels like a hundred lost seasons before Leon Rose and Tom Thibodeau got here we hardly throw those back) will get a full opportunity to present their best selves, to their fans, to the rest of the Eastern Conference, to all their doubters. It is also their chance, still right there, to make the run we thought they were set up to make a last spring, and not to have everybody fall into an old-time fever dream about which star player — Giannis? Durant? — might be the next reinforcement on his way to The Garden to save us all.
Maybe what we really find out in a few weeks is if these Knicks, even with a better record this time, one that is currently the fifth-best in the whole league, truly are better with Towns and Bridges instead of Isaiah Hartenstein and Donte DiVincenzo. Or if they locked in the middle of the pack again, without enough talent or game to make it to the conference semis for the first time in 25 years.
There was no disgrace in getting blown out in the second half by the Cavaliers. No Brunson. No Mitchell Robinson. Rested Cavs team after the Knicks had played the punching-bag Sixers the night before. You know what happened to the Celtics on Wednesday night? They lost at home to the Heat by almost the same score the Cavs put on the Knicks.
And the very next night after Nikola Jokic scored 61 points as part of an historic triple-double, they lost to the Spurs. Reasons, not excuses, all over the NBA map, everybody grinding toward April 19 and the first slate of playoff games. Then we will see about the Knicks, when they won’t have to face the Cavs in the first round, or the Celtics, but will still be asked to show us what they really got.
They really are about to win 50 games in consecutive seasons for the first time in 30 years. It feels as if they have been locked into the No. 3 seed in their conference for months and months. They have feasted against bad teams and turned into punching bags themselves against Cleveland, against Boston, against Oklahoma City. In so many ways, they are a mystery, even when Brunson isn’t in street clothes.
They can score when they have all their players and can’t stop good teams from scoring, even when they do have all their players. As great as Brunson has been as a Knick, as much as he gives them on offense, he still gives up too much on defense. As much as Rose gave up to get Bridges, he only occasionally shows up as the kind of player for whom Rose did give up five No. 1’s.
Now we see if Rose did build a better playoff team, despite how the Knicks have looked against most playoff teams. Sometimes you worry that Brunson’s best shot to get past the second round has come and gone, at least for the time being, that his best shot was in those six bare-knuckle games against the Heat in the second round two years ago, before the Heat went all the way to the NBA Finals.
“Did we win the championship?” Brunson said after Game 7 against the Pacers last year. “Did we come close?”
These Knicks were built to get closer. In a few weeks we find out, in real time, when they’re 0-0 along with everybody else in the tournament, if they can.