Knicks' confidence remains high after tough loss to Oklahoma City
Knicks guard Josh Hart looks on in the second half of an NBA game against the Oklahoma City Thunder at Madison Square Garden on Friday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The question was a simple one, and it was posed not by the hordes of media with cameras and recorders in front of the players but by the players themselves.
In the locker room after the Knicks’ embarrassing 126-101 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on Friday night, the rest of the team already was gone. Mikal Bridges was the last one still in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, dressing slowly and considering the obvious.
“When times get tough,” he said, “who are we going to be?”
The question didn’t come out of thin air. It’s one that the fans and media have been asking, maybe since the trades that brought Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns to the Knicks and certainly as the season has inched close to the halfway mark.
After a back-to-back set against Milwaukee and Detroit on Sunday and Monday, the Knicks will have hit 41 games, and as the saying goes, it’s getting late early.
What the Knicks have shown are glimpses and hints of the team that they hope they can be. They can point to one-sided wins over Denver and Minnesota and a 25-14 record. And they’ve also shown that there is something unknown, unproven. The Knicks are 0-5 against the top two teams in each conference, and four of those losses have been by at least 10 points.
To be what they want to be, to move past the Eastern Conference semifinals (at which point the previous two seasons ended), they have to be able to show they can beat top teams. Nothing anyone saw Friday night would lend confidence to that notion.
Do the Knicks have a chance to be one of those top teams? “Yeah, I think we do,” Josh Hart said. “I think at the end of the day, we have to go out there and execute at a high level.
“We have to go out there with energy. We have to go out there with no egos. We have to go out there with no individual agendas. We have to go out there and sacrifice. I think that’s the biggest thing. We’re a new group. We’re still learning, figuring it out. But we can’t expect to just have talent and go out there and win games. We’ve got to lock in and compete.
“I think we’re all confident in ourselves. At the end of the day, we’ve got to continue to build, we’ve got to continue to grow, and that has nothing to do with the opponent. I don’t care if it’s the Celtics, OKC or whoever’s struggling in the league; at the end of the day, we’ve got to focus on what we can focus on. That’s the people in this locker room.
“We can’t focus on, ‘Oh, this one win is going to show us and show everyone else that we can contend.’ We don’t care what anyone else says. At the end of the day, we’ve got to figure it out in this locker room.”
Jalen Brunson added, “I feel like we do have the talent to compete, but it’s not always talent . . . It’s all about just building every single day. Sometimes you can do the right things and fail, and sometimes you can do the wrong things and have success. [Friday] we did the wrong things and failed, so that’s the difference. But every single day, we just got to keep building, keep chipping away. Just not lose faith, not lose confidence.”
Nights like Friday undermine the confidence and bring up questions of agendas. And the Knicks have yet to show that there is a counter-argument.
“It’s a long season,” coach Tom Thibodeau said. “The idea is to be playing your best at the end. There’s going to be bumps in the road. How do we get through those things? Are we mentally tough when we face adversity? And can we grow?
“That’s where the focus has to be, on growing and getting better . . . You can take a snippet out of any season and say this is what it is, and then you can wait to the end to know what it is. So is it bad? Is it good? It could be better. Do we want it to be better? Yeah. The reality is this is where our record is, we’re third in the East, we’d like to be first.”
Help wanted
The Knicks have been under scrutiny for the lack of depth and the minutes crush on the starting five this season. Some of it is because of the injuries that have left them without Mitchell Robinson all season and without Deuce McBride for five straight games before Friday. Add in the absence of Landry Shamet until the last 10 games and an earlier injury to Precious Achiuwa.
But some of the blame also goes to the bench beyond those veterans. League sources have indicated that at the highest reaches of the franchise, there is a bit of panic and finger-pointing going on. The Knicks have three rookies on the roster who have made little impact despite a deep roster of player development coaches.
Westchester Knicks coach Desagana Diop recently became the first coach to win back-to-back titles in the G League Winter Showcase. But a league source indicated that the Knicks have been searching for a player development-focused coach to head the program, reaching out for permission to speak with candidates and putting the onus on speeding the learning curve for the young players on the NBA roster.
Broken Bridges
It seemed as if the worries about Bridges’ shooting were buried with nights like the 41-point effort on Christmas Day. That game capped an 11-game stretch in which he shot 57.7% from the field and 46.9% from three-point range. But in the nine games since, he’s dropped to 45.1% overall and 21.0% from three. And in the last four games, he’s 3-for-30 from beyond the arc — including 0-for-7 in a scoreless outing Friday night against OKC.
“Just got to make them,” he said. “I think I’ve been short on a lot of them these last couple of games. Just got to put a little more lift on them. Been short on almost all of them. Just put more legs in it.”
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.
