Knicks know winning and becoming Eastern Conference contenders is about more than having star power
Jalen Brunson of the Knicks controls the ball during a game against the Bucks at Madison Square Garden on Saturday. Credit: Errol Anderson
With the seemingly never-ending debate about whether the Knicks have a star or need a star, an odd lesson has come to the team, courtesy of the Milwaukee Bucks.
With a Christmas Day meeting with Milwaukee looming, the Knicks already have faced the Bucks three times, and each time they've come up with a glittering star performance.
There was the 45-point night from Jalen Brunson in November, a 41-point gem by Julius Randle a month later, and finally a 36-point performance by Brunson — all of it coming in three quarters — on Saturday afternoon.
And the common denominator in all three games against Giannis Antetokounmpo and Damian Lillard? The efforts weren’t nearly enough to get the Knicks anything but a one-sided loss.
“I mean we lost,” Josh Hart said after Saturday's 130-111 defeat. “Stats don’t really mean [expletive] when we’re losing. You can’t play for stats, you can’t be so consumed with stats. And obviously, we’re in New York. You’re going to be talked about. You’re going to be talked about well when you have good stats. When you have bad stats, you’re going to be talked about badly. But at the end of the day, you can’t play for stats.
“You can’t make the pass that you think is going to be an assist. Sometimes you need to make the easy pass. You might make the hockey assist that’s not going to show up but it’s going to be successful. At the end of the day, no matter what, you want to win. I don’t think anybody can tell me how many points [Denver’s Nikola] Jokic or Jamal Murray or Michael Porter Jr. — how much they averaged last year. But they got a [expletive] ring. At the end of the day, the stats don’t mean anything. We can’t play to get stats. We got to play for wins and play together.”
The lesson perhaps is that the critics who say the Knicks need to acquire a star are correct, but that as constituted, the Knicks' only chance is to forget about playing like stars and play like the hardest-working team. That secondary goal has been a trademark of the franchise since Tom Thibodeau took over as coach, and most of the players brought in fit that mold.
But in trying to prove they have enough to compete with the elite teams in the Eastern Conference — a failed endeavor thus far; the Knicks are 0-6 against the Bucks and Boston Celtics — their trouble has not been an inability to put up spectacular scoring performances but failures on the defensive end. In the six losses, the Knicks have given up an average of 123.5 points per game.
And beginning with the Dec. 8 loss at Boston that led to Mitchell Robinson’s shutdown and ankle surgery, the Knicks have faced these teams three times and given up 133, 146 and 130 points.
“Our offense isn’t the problem really,” Brunson said after Saturday’s loss. “We’re scoring 110. But letting up 130 is not ideal. The offensive side of the ball, we can fix that easily or make a couple of tweaks. But the defensive side of the ball, we need to be better.
“It’s not just one thing. It’s collectively we need to be better, run them off the three-point line, not foul. There’s a bunch of things we can go on and say we need to be better at. Collectively and entirely, we need to be better.”
As daunting as it may be, the Knicks on Monday will have another chance to prove something — not to see if Brunson and Randle can measure up to one of the best in the game in Antetokounmpo but whether they can measure up as a team to the top teams, an important lesson less than two months from the trade deadline.
“I think if that’s where we want to be, then these are the challenges we need to go through,” Isaiah Hartenstein said. “ . . . We have a lot of guys that want the challenge. I don’t think we want to shy away from anything, so we’re excited that we get to see them in a couple of days and improve on what we did in this game.”
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.
