“Playoffs?! Don’t talk about playoffs! Are you kidding me? Playoffs?! I’m just hoping we can win a game, another game!”
There’s your brand-new Knicks fight song. There’s the mantra. Give the royalties to Jim Mora. Give him the copyright. Maybe Derek Fisher’s problem is he should have been more forceful — more Mora — when he was downplaying the Knicks’ shot at the postseason a few weeks ago.
Fisher didn’t get much right during his year-and-a-half on the job. His rotation was puzzling. His substitution patterns were baffling. There were times, late in games, when you would look at him on the sidelines and he looked more out of place than Donald Trump in a confessional.
But give him this much:
He was right to believe the Knicks might not exactly be playoff worthy. It was the rest of us who were kidding ourselves, who bought into the Knicks when they were 20-20, when they were 22-22. Some of us should even know better: Jeff Van Gundy was a believer. Gregg Popovich was a believer.
Playoffs?
PLAYOFFS?
Now you’re left hoping the Knicks can win another game. Seriously. That was the Nets who made them look like a JV team Friday night at Barclays Center, the 14-40 (make that 15-40 Nets), not the Warriors, not the Spurs, not the Cavaliers.
That was the Nets — not the Thunder, not the Clippers — who rattled off a 20-2 run in the third quarter to turn a five-point Knicks lead into a 13-point Nets lead. That was the Nets who, after letting the Knicks draw within three points early in the fourth quarter, put them away with an immediate 10-0 surge.
That was the Nets who made the Knicks look so enfeebled, so non-competitive, so slow, so …
“We didn’t execute. On either end,” interim coach Kurt Rambis said. “That’s disappointing.”
Yes. That is one word. Here are a few others: Putrid. Lousy. Rotten. Unwatchable.
Playoffs?
Playoffs? Are you kidding me?
This is no longer a regression. The Knicks had lost 10 out of 11 heading into the break, the season already had gone sideways, the postseason already was looking like a longer long shot than Chuck Wepner.
You could talk yourself into anything you wanted to: the floor had started to tilt on the Knicks when Carmelo Anthony tripped over that referee’s foot. Kristaps Porzingis was dealing with the rookie wall. All of that. And to add red meat for the masses, Fisher was sacrificed. Is there more of a time-honored solution for turning things around — at least for a week or two — than axing the coach?
Well, except Rambis is now 0-2 with the Knicks, and not for nothing, but he needs to go on a 91-game winning streak starting tonight in Minnesota just to bring his career record as a head coach to .500. So it’s not as if anyone was expecting Rambis to introduce a whole new bag of tricks on the sidelines.
But this? The Knicks had been off since Feb. 9. They were rested. They were as healthy as they had been in weeks. The first time these teams played, in December, the Knicks took a 30-point lead by the midway point of the second quarter.
Those were the heady days — hard to conjure now — when every small victory the Knicks posted was celebrated, because anything — just about everything — compared to last season’s 17-win dumpster fire could be celebrated as progress. That was before anyone figured this could end up in the playoffs, when just not watching stink rise up from the Garden floor was worth rejoicing.
Yeah. That feels like an awfully long time ago.
“We’re going to have to find five guys who can maintain defensive intensity,” Rambis said, “who can remain active and energize and go out and compete.”
Yes, well … good luck with that. As things stand now, these Knicks are a lost cause, back-sliding by the game, tip-toeing toward unwatchable. They’re at Minnesota on Saturday. The Raptors come to town Monday, then there’s the Pacers and the Magic and the Heat, and … and, really, the question is really still in play after watching them mail one in Friday night:
When are they going to win another game?