Knicks' inexperience at crunch time costing them games

When the Knicks openly talked about this season as a developmental year, it meant that there would be a focus on the growth of young players such as Kevin Knox, Frank Ntilikina and Mitchell Robinson. But coach David Fizdale had something else in mind besides the X’s and O’s.

He wants the team to learn how to win. And those lessons are hard ones.

Despite being clearly outmanned, the Knicks have played tight games against Milwaukee, Boston, Golden State and, most recently, Indiana. The better-than-expected performances all have  turned out the same way, though — with a loss. That leaves them heading out on the road with a 2-6 record as they prepare to face the Dallas Mavericks on Friday night.

Close but not good enough may play well for the lottery hopes, but it  already is wearing on the team.

“Yeah, I mean, you can only go through so many games and say it’s the youth,” Tim Hardaway Jr. said after scoring 37 points in a 107-101 loss to the Pacers on Wednesday night. “There’s got to come a point in time we’ve got to buckle down and close these games out, especially when we have a four-point lead with like three, four minutes left to go in the game. So with that being said, just got to move on, learn from it. We know what we have to do as a ballclub. We just have to go out there and execute it.”

The Knicks actually have outscored their opponents on average through the first three quarters but have been beaten by an average of 6.0 points per game in the fourth quarters —- the second-worst figure in the NBA through Wednesday,  ahead of only the 7.7 points per game by which Oklahoma City was being outscored.

The constant collapses are explainable with an inexperienced point guard in Ntilikina, who made his first career start at the position last week, and Fizdale’s decision to surround him with players such as undrafted rookie Allonzo Trier, as he did Wednesday down the stretch. But it doesn’t make it any easier.

Fizdale and even the rookies were pointing at an inability to get into their offense or even to  understand exactly what the team was trying to do. Fizdale explained that the team is expected to echo the play calls in a noisy arena so that all players get the information, but he said that it wasn’t happening.

“We ran the play wrong,” Fizdale said of one forced attempt out of a timeout in the final minutes. “We had about five of those tonight where we came out of a timeout and we were running into each other. It was stuff that we’ve been running the whole preseason and even the regular season up to now. But for whatever reason, late, it just wasn’t clicking.

"No matter how much I tried to get them to focus in the huddle, we weren’t locked in how we needed to be. And that’s on me. So I’ve got to figure out how to get us to focus in better in those timeouts.”

“We weren’t organized on offense,” said Trier, who had 14 points and shot 6-for-7. “We didn’t get good shots to end the game . . . We just have to be better, plain and simple, especially down the stretch.”