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The Knicks are guaranteed to arrive at the All-Star break later this week with the third-best record in the Eastern Conference, a good sign for a team that began the season searching for chemistry with two new starters.
They also own the fifth-best record in the NBA, so clearly, the sky is not entirely falling.
Of the four teams above them in the league-wide standings, however, the Knicks only have defeated the Grizzlies last month and are winless in five head-to-head meetings with the Thunder (0-2), Cavaliers (0-1) and Celtics (0-2) after Boston completely outclassed them for a second time this season Saturday night at the Garden.
Tom Thibodeau’s team (34-18) has five regular-season games with the two teams it likely would have to get past to advance to the Eastern Conference Finals and/or the NBA championship round, with stops in both cities Feb. 21-23 in the second and third games after the All-Star break.
Granted, the Knicks were playing again Saturday without two-way forward OG Anunoby, who missed his third straight game with a sprained right foot after initially being listed on the injury report as doubtful.
Karl-Anthony Towns and Josh Hart also endured rocky performances after showing up on that list with respective recurring knee issues.
Still, the Celtics also were without two starters in former All-Stars Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. That didn’t stop Jayson Tatum from dismantling the Knicks with a 40-point performance, nor did it prevent him and his teammates from shooting 19-for-39 (.487) from beyond the arc to give them an astonishing 48 makes from deep in two blowout victories over the Knicks.
With back-to-back games beginning Tuesday in Indiana and at home Wednesday against the Hawks, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to have Anunoby play before the break when he could get an additional 12 days of rest if he waits until the Feb. 20 home game against the Bulls.
Mitchell Robinson conceivably also could make his anticipated season debut in those games, assuming he is cleared to resume 5-on-5 scrimmaging in the interim.
Either way, the Knicks were visibly disappointed in their latest subpar performance against the teams they are chasing, with a dejected Jalen Brunson (36 points) saying the measuring stick failing “as a whole was just unacceptable.”
“Just not playing our style of basketball,” Brunson lamented.
Hart, Brunson’s usually opinionated and talkative teammate, also was mostly at a loss for words, pausing and responding “I don’t know” multiple times when asked why the Knicks were unable to stop the Celtics’ outside shooting — saying Tatum “is an All-Star for a reason” — or to keep them off the boards with a 48-30 rebounding edge.
“I don’t know, I think we didn’t come out great. We were stagnant,” Hart said. “[Big men Luke] Kornet and [Al] Horford out there were kind of bogging up the paint. So we just didn’t execute.”
The Celtics mostly took Towns out of the game, and he finished with a season-low nine points on just eight shot attempts in 28 minutes.
“We know we’ve got a lot of work to do. Simple as that,” Towns said afterward. “There’s no sugarcoating. There’s no moral wins, nothing like that. It’s something we’ve got to work on if we expect to beat a team that y’all have expectations of us to compete [with] and be.
“If we also have those same aspirations in this locker room, which I know we do, we’ve got to find a way to beat teams like tonight. That’s a team that is in the race. They want to be in the race as much as we do to win a championship. And for them, it’s another one, a back-to-back. Championship teams, great teams, in my experience, they test your discipline. Something that we’ve got to work on, our discipline for 48 [minutes].”
With no practice Super Bowl Sunday, the Knicks will get back to work Monday before heading to Indiana for the first of their final 30 games.
“You learn from every game … the disappointment of a loss,” Thibodeau said. “But make sure that we learn from it, and then obviously we have to take a hard look and get better.”
