Knockout

Time for the Knicks to figure out who they want to be.

I waffled a bit over whether or not I would send out a newsletter today.

It’s not that I don’t have anything to say about last night, or about this team, or about what last night should tell us about this team.

I do. None of it is very good.

Still, I went back and forth over whether to hit the keyboard.

The reason why has to do with something I read years ago. It was a quote from a veteran writer, dishing advice on her craft.

The advice was simple: start at the end. Figure out where you want to finish, and then work backwards to get there. The rest will work itself out as long as you have a clear goal in mind.

To this day, it’s a rule I always follow in spirit when I write about the Knicks. Even if I don’t know exactly what my endpoint looks like, I have a distinct feeling in my gut that guides me. Good, bad, or indifferent, I always know what I think about this basketball team at any given moment. With that as my compass, I’m usually comfortable casting off.

That isn’t the case today.

After seeing the Knicks lose at home to the Oklahoma City Thunder by a score of 126-101 in a game that wasn’t as close as the final score might indicate, I don’t really know what to think about what - or who - I just watched.

I know I’m annoyed, frustrated, a little angry, more than a little worried, and extremely curious about where this season goes from here.

But in terms of a definitive opinion about what, precisely, this team is? I’m as lost as ever.

It’s not that last night (or, for that matter, any of their distressing performances this season) have made me question their talent. That is there in droves. I also still believe in the fit of their core pieces (read: the starting five) with one another. It makes sense on paper, and I’ve seen enough from their season so far to back up that theory.

I even have a belief in their collective grit, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary last night. This wasn’t a team who mailed it in, or didn’t play hard, or didn’t care about the outcome, even if there was trace evidence of some of the above.

No, this was a team who got hit in the mouth and didn’t know how to respond.

They punched back here and there, but failed to land anything more than a glancing blow, if even that. As a collective unit, it’s not unfair to say they were helpless against an elite team that was firing on all cylinders. Talk about the disparity in 3-point shooting percentage all you want (a comical 51.9 percent to an even more comical 12.9 percent), but that confuses symptom for disease.

Confidence is the lifeblood of shooting, and the New York Knicks were anything but a confident bunch last night. Sure, they may have had confidence individually, but as a unit? As a group capable of elevating the whole higher than the sum of the parts? You’ll find more evidence of eskimos in Ecuador.

And no, I certainly don’t find it coincidental that for the second time in three games, Josh Hart openly talked in the locker room about needing to ditch individual agendas in favor of energy and sacrifice.

Like pornography, you know it when you see a basketball team searching for itself, and right now the Knicks are in the wilderness.

We probably shouldn’t be surprised. I’ve written about trust before, comparing the ultimate necessity for a successful relationship to the ultimate necessity for a successful team. It cannot be faked, can only be earned, and usually only comes through shared adversity. If there is a silver lining to last night’s shellacking, it is that maybe this is the trial by fire the Knicks needed to come together as a group.

Or so we hope, if for no other reason than the unpleasantness of the alternative.

There’s no hiding from it now. It may not be easy to cast a discerning eye on this team at the moment, but they better take a long, hard look in the mirror regardless. The warts that were exposed last night aren’t going away with more comfy wins against bad teams. Leon Rose emptied the canister to build a contender. We knew they had to overcome certain challenges to scale that loftiest of mountains. No one said it was going to be easy, and we should all have figured they’d get knocked to the mat a few times along the way.

Last night, they fell and they fell hard. Hard enough to shake you to your core. Hard enough to make us question whether it’s worth it for them to get up at all. How badly do they want it? And what are they willing to do to get it?

We’ll find out soon enough.

It’s time for the Knicks to show us what kind of team they want to be.

Because right now, I don’t think any of us have a clue.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”