Knicks guard Tim Hardaway Jr. in the final minute against...

Knicks guard Tim Hardaway Jr. in the final minute against the Atlanta Hawks on Dec. 21, 2018. The Hawks won, 114-107. Credit: AP/Adam Hunger

LOS ANGELES — In the hours before the Knicks played their first game after Kristaps Porzingis tore his anterior cruciate ligament 11 months ago, Tim Hardaway Jr. was not about to quit. “Tank is not in my vocabulary,” he said. “If anybody feels like we should be tanking or should be doing something like that, they’re rooting for the wrong team.”

Now, as the Knicks make their way through the season without Porzingis, Hardaway finds himself the only established veteran in the starting lineup and sees a player-development project taking place around him. With the Knicks at 9-29 and having lost eight straight games heading into Friday night’s game against the Lakers, maybe his vocabulary has been expanded.

“It’s obviously a tough pill to swallow,” Hardaway said after the team’s morning shootaround at UCLA. “You definitely want to try to win as many games as possible. I’m a competitor. None of us got here by losing ballgames for our respective ballclubs when we were in college or in high school. Everybody was winners. Everybody wanted to win.

“Just to be in this situation is tough, but it builds character and matures you as a ballplayer and it makes you relish and appreciate the fact that you’re in this opportunity, that you’re in the NBA.”

They may be in the NBA, but the Knicks are near the bottom of it, entering Friday with the third-worst record in the league.

The players may not be interested in tanking, but the front office and coach David Fizdale have set a course toward the lottery, and the new system allots equal odds to the bottom three teams for the first pick.

Hardaway’s comments last season were directed mostly at fans who were eying the lottery rather than the playoffs. That netted Kevin Knox,  and with the team bound for another lottery pick, there is no pretense of chasing a playoff berth.

Hardaway remains in the starting lineup, but Enes Kanter has been relegated to the second unit and could lose more minutes with Mitchell Robinson coming back from a sprained ankle. Courtney Lee and Lance Thomas have disappeared from the rotation, leaving rookies and a rotating cast of players. But Hardaway still believes fans shouldn’t hope the Knicks lose.

“Yeah. I agree with that a hundred percent,” he said. “I’m pretty sure if they were put in our position, they wouldn’t want to feel this way. Everybody has their own opinions. I’m not here to tell them what to think or what not to think. I’m just here to tell them what type of person I am, and I know that it goes with the rest of the 14 ballplayers on this ballclub. I’m just gonna leave it at that.

“I understand where they’re coming from, but did they play the game of basketball? Do they know, like, what we go through as an athlete, as a professional athlete? It doesn’t feel good. It doesn’t feel good to us,but we understand off the court where they’re coming from when it comes to record and when it comes to percentage-wise and what you can get and what you can’t get. We understand that. But that’s for the front office to figure out. We’re basketball players. We’re here to play [between] the four lines.

"Like I said, it’s their opinions. It is what it is. All I could do is just go based off my beliefs and what I feel. And I know the rest of the 14 guys here, they’re competitors and they want to compete.”

The Knicks entered Friday second to last in defensive rating, second to last in field-goal percentage and third to last in opponents’ field-goal percentage.

Said Hardaway, “I mean, Coach Fiz and a lot of the guys, we all believe we’re better than our record speaks. He always tells us to stay in the moment, and we are who we are right now. We make mistakes. We missed rotations in games we should’ve won, we made ridiculous decisions as players in those games which caused us to lose. A lot of the games we were up by 20, up 10 at the half, we let that slide and the team came back and won. We are where we are. We’ve got to take it to the chin and move forward.”

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