Knicks have not taken foot off gas in recent stretch against lesser teams
Knicks center Mitchell Robinson, left, and Raptors guard Kobi Simmons vie for the ball during the first half of an NBA game Wednesday in Toronto. Credit: The Canadian Press via AP/Frank Gunn
SAN ANTONIO — While the appearance of Victor Wembanyama presented a challenge and a bit of curiosity on Friday night, the more pressing task for the Knicks was handling a 17-56 Spurs team limping to the finish line.
With less than 10 games remaining in the regular season after Friday, the Knicks concluded their four-game stretch against lottery-bound teams, determined not to let one of them play spoiler as playoff positioning reaches its final stages.
The Knicks (44-28) entered Frost Bank Center in third place in the Eastern Conference, 1 1⁄2 games behind second-place Milwaukee and a half-game ahead of Cleveland. In the first three games of this recent stretch, they beat the Nets by 12, Detroit by 25 and Toronto by 44, leaving no doubt about how seriously they took these games.
“Everything matters,” coach Tom Thibodeau said after Wednesday’s win in Toronto. “And so the challenge for us is keep getting better.
“Everyone in this league is capable of beating you, so I know there’s always the notion of, ‘Oh, you should win this game.’ No, not in the NBA.
“For one, you can’t get here without being a great player. Everyone has great players. And so I think you’re making a huge mistake if you don’t put the proper amount of preparations into each and every game. And we’re not taking them lightly.”
“I think every night you look and you see there‘s games that a team that‘s an underdog prevails and there‘s teams that we‘ve seen 30-point leads dissipate and 19-point leads, so you can never let your guard down in this league, and I think as soon as you start feeling too good about yourself, that‘s usually when you‘re gonna get knocked down.”
With seven wins in their last eight games entering Friday, the Knicks had steadily moved up the standings, passing Orlando and Cleveland and creating some distance between themselves and the tightly bunched pack of teams behind them.
But one thing Thibodeau has ingrained in his players since the start of training camp is to focus on the game in front of them and not look ahead. For the Knicks, that means not gazing at the standings and imaging whom they might face in the postseason. They entered Friday slotted against the sixth-seeded Indiana Pacers, but that certainly can change in the final weeks.
“Yeah, I mean it’s not in our focal point, but we definitely have an eye on it,” Deuce McBride said. “It’s the league, you’re always going to understand it. You want to move up in the standings. I think whatever we can do to continue to win games and get in the best position we can to have home-court advantage, that’s the biggest thing.”
The Knicks’ schedule will get tougher in the next week. They’ll host Oklahoma City on Sunday night, visit Miami on Tuesday and return home to face Sacramento on Thursday before visiting Chicago the next night for the second game of a back-to-back.
Mitchell Robinson was back on Wednesday, but the Knicks are still waiting for Julius Randle and OG Anunoby — players who could take them to another level — to return.
“We can’t really think like that,” McBride said. “We can only play with the guys that we have available and do what we can to win every night.”
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.
