Out of Excuses
The Knicks, again, did what the Knicks do.
Good morning. Can we go back to the All-Star break?
Pistons 126, Knicks 111
35-21 (L1); 21-8 at home
If we’re going to sum up the latest season-is-over loss for the New York Knicks, a team that has made these types of defeats their specialty since this core was fully assembled in the summer of 2024, we can probably do so in two quotes - one from before the game and one from after.
The first quote is courtesy of Knicks head coach Mike Brown, who, when asked on Thursday about how New York should approach their third game against a Pistons team that had beaten them by a combined 59 points in their previous two matchups, did not beat around the bush:
The second quote is courtesy of Karl-Anthony Towns, who finished with a nice stat line but was invisible on offense in the first half after scoring just six points the last time he faced Detroit:
On the surface, these two quotes have nothing to do with one another, and maybe I’m grasping at straws by trying to connect them. This team has a way of making me do that.
But after watching the basketball equivalent of a bad sitcom rerun from the tail-end of a once great show, I’ve officially run out of common sense answers to explain how or why these Knicks are the way they are. Has there ever been a more consistently underwhelming very good team in NBA history? At home, after seven days off, against a supposed rival who was missing both members of their two-headed center tandem, New York was outclassed in effort, execution, and game plan. They flatly did not look worthy of sharing a court with the Pistons.
Not that that’s a new phenomenon. Because of those previous ass-kickings, Mike Brown told us this game should have more meaning. The Knicks, by and large, didn’t seem to agree. They were undisciplined on defense out of the gate, and other than Jose Alvarado and Jeremy Sochan, showed absolutely no pride in preventing Cade Cunningham from doing every blessed thing he wanted to on the basketball court. OG Anunoby was the most obvious culprit when it came to individual defense against Cade - he was dreadful - but he was far from the only one. Across the board, they allowed themselves to get punked by this team yet again.
So why, you might ask, am I connecting what was effectively a dismissal of their head coach’s polite request with KAT’s passive aggressive drive-by at Mike Brown after the game?
