Steve Popper: Knicks' Mike Brown avoids looking ahead as regular season nears end
Knicks head coach Mike Brown looks on against the New Orleans Pelicans in the second half of an NBA basketball game at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Mike Brown, like most coaches, tries to focus his attention on the immediate task at hand, the next game on the schedule, the next practice, and never lets his mind wander past that.
But it’s hard to avoid as the season winds down to the final weeks.
“Throughout the course of the year you naturally look at it,” Brown said before the Knicks took on the Pelicans, a game that, when completed, would reduce the remaining schedule to single digits. “But I haven’t looked at it any harder than I did before. People tell me.”
Brown’s brother-in-law, who is staying with him, told the coach: “If you guys win tomorrow you’re in second place.”
“I don’t know if that’s right,” Brown replied. “Because I think Boston has one less loss than us. So I said they would have to lose another game and then I think we have the tiebreaker on them. I get reminded very easily by people around me where we’re at.”
A 121-116 win at the Garden put them in a virtual tie with Boston for second place in the Eastern Conference — and Brown was correct, that it put the Knicks at 48-25 and Boston at 47-24, so Boston would still have a slight percentage points edge.
But if the Knicks could remain at least tied with the Celtics they would take second place by virtue of tiebreakers even if Boston were to win the last remaining meeting between the two teams.
It might have seemed unlikely with the way Boston has played this season and then getting Jayson Tatum back. They won the first two games after he returned from a torn Achilles suffered against the Knicks in the Eastern Conference semifinals last season, but have gone just 4-3 since and have seemed out of sorts.
And the Knicks captured their seventh straight win Tuesday, not exactly looking locked in during that span, but doing the work they had to do in a stretch of games against lottery-bound opponents.
It has provided the Knicks with a chance to get through what Karl-Anthony Towns calls an “inexpensive expensive lesson,” getting a win while seeing the flaws that need to be corrected.
They put this on display Tuesday, a 15-0 run ending the first quarter gave them a 14-point lead. And then they promptly surrendered an 18-2 run to fall behind again, before managing a six-point halftime lead. And in the end, as it so often is, the Knicks needed Jalen Brunson to bail them out. Brunson scored 15 of his 32 points in the fourth quarter.
They have managed to dodge the sort of devastating injuries that other teams have been afflicted with, managing Mitchell Robinson through a season that has included no back-to-back appearances. It’s something that they won’t have to concern themselves with in the postseason. Deuce McBride has been moving closer to a return and the Knicks have said that a bone bruise suffered by Landry Shamet is not believed to be a serious problem.
So they move along, collecting the wins they should, and trying to find the fits they need.
“Good teams win games that they’re supposed to,” Josh Hart said. “Anyone in the league can beat you on any given day. This team is a really good team. Their record doesn’t show it just because of the injuries. It feels good. We’ve got a tough nine games to finish the season. But it’s all in preparation.”
“Maybe [look at the standings] a little bit. But it’s still kind of early. I know that there is a cluster of teams that are really close in the standings. Maybe around with four or five games left I’ll look at it.”
The chase to the finish won’t be as easy as the recent stretch has been. While New Orleans carried a 25-47 record into Tuesday, they had won 10 of their 16 games since the All-Star break and had no lottery balls to chase, having dealt away their first-round pick in the Draft.
“We’re still in the NBA,” Jordan Clarkson said. “These teams, this Pelicans team are a bunch of guys that are real talented and can play. So it’s not like you just walk into the building and just throw the game up and say we’re going to win by 40 or 50. We’ve still got to come out there and compete. At the same time, we’re a really good team and I feel teams try to gauge themselves on us as well.
"We’re really just focusing on us coming in, putting our emphasis on what we want to get done and that’s what we’ve been doing these last games.
“Never look ahead, man. We’re here. We’re taking one game at a time. Every team, we’re not looking over or anything. We’re just trying to finish strong, win every game, and if we can win out these last games that’s what we want to do, and finish this regular season strong.”
The Knicks now go on a four-game road trip through Charlotte, Oklahoma City, Houston and Memphis.
But that’s for another day. Even with the push from a brother-in-law, Brown wasn’t thinking about those games yet.
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.
