There is plenty to fix. That much is obvious. There are plenty of things the Knicks need to do better to maximize who they are as a team, and what they wish to accomplish this year. Plenty of the issues with the Knicks are internal, and can be tended to with sweat and elbow grease.
There is the defense, which surely keeps Tom Thibodeau from falling into long stretches of deep sleep at night, because this is clearly not what he considers standard. There is a propensity to hand away large late-game leads. There has become, dare we say, an overreliance on the 3-ball, which can bite badly on nights (like this one) when they only make one for every five they take.
All of that is true. All of that is right. All of that helps explain these first back-to-back losses of the young season, Wednesday night’s humbling 111-98 loss to the Pacers at Indianapolis’ Gainbridge Fieldhouse backing up Monday’s desultory 113-104 stumble at the Garden to the Raptors.
“As a group, we didn’t play well,” Thibodeau said after the Knicks fell behind 11-0 before breaking a sweat, cut it to as close as three in the fourth and then got flattened down the stretch by Indiana, enjoying a rare night of close to full health and close to full strength.
“To win you have to do three things: defend, rebound and keep turnovers down. We did one of the three [they only committed three turnovers]. Our defense wasn’t there and as a result our rebounding wasn’t there. We’ve got to fix that part.”
Said Julius Randle: “We’ve got to get our defense in order.”
The thing is, past performance from this group of players and this coach says those things will get fixed, and the law of averages insists they’re due for a couple of good shooting games, too. But that’s only part of the challenge this time around.
Even long before the season started it seemed clear that the 2021-22 version of the Eastern Conference was going to look a lot different than last year’s edition, one that was compromised enough where the Knicks — to their credit, mind you — were able to ride a late-season roll all the way to the No. 4 seed.
What we’ve seen in the season’s opening weeks is that reality absolutely matches that perception.
“The East is loaded,” Thibodeau said. “Every night you have to bring it.”
The Raptors and the Pacers exemplify the year-over-year difference. The Raptors were a team without a home last year, playing their games in Tampa-St. Pete, and it crushed them. The Pacers were decimated by injury and got knocked out of the playoffs by the Wizards in the play-in round.
Both are legit again this year, joining the Knicks and no fewer than six other teams — Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Charlotte, Boston and Washington — to serve as a legit second tier behind the presumed Nets/Bucks/Sixers tripartite power group. And if Cleveland is as good as its early returns, toss its burgundy-and-gold cap onto the pile, too.
In other words: There’s less room for error now than there’s ever been. The East serving as a JV foil to the West, those days are long gone. There are no nights off. And when you are a team with substantial ambitions and in-progress chemistry, as the Knicks are, that makes for quite a grind.
“This league is really hard,” Randle said. “It’s hard to win in this league.”
It gets harder. Friday night is Milwaukee, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, and the 2021 championship banner hanging in the rafters of the Fiserv Forum. The Sixers, Bucks (again), Hornets and Pacers await next week. You’d better believe it’s hard.
It helps to have a recent spate of success to draw on, and confidence, and a team-wide work ethic that promises the Knicks will attack their problems with sweat equity. But some nights, you run into a buzz saw. Some nights you’re down 11-0 before you even take your warm-ups off. Some nights you get bulldozed by someone like Myles Turner, 11 3s to his name all year, 7-for-10 from 3 on this night.
“Things in this league, they change quickly,” Thibodeau said. “You have to be mentally tough when you’re facing adversity and that’s where we are.”
They’re also in the East. In other years, that might’ve been a remedy in itself. Not this year. This year the East is loaded. This year you have to bring it every night.