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There comes a time when a slump becomes something else. There comes a time when talking hopefully about turning things around in time for the playoff suddenly seems like an ominous talking point.
Soon enough, there will come a time when the Knicks will need to get around to making some kind of stand, some kind of statement, provide some kind of signal that we haven’t already seen the best of them this year.
That time wasn’t last night, not with the Magic toying with them in their own way, as the Celtics teased them two nights earlier, not with this 111-99 loss that officially capsized the Knicks’ ship, sent them under .500 for the first time since Thanksgiving.
But that time has to come soon.
MAGIC, HOWARD PUT KNICKS BELOW .500
D’ANTONI SHOWING THE STRAIN OF SKID
“We just have to figure it out,” a solemn-faced Mike D’Antoni said last night, after another Excedrin mess of a basketball game. “I’m hoping when the calendar gets better and we get a couple of days off we can bounce back.”
Fatigue is the new crutch, product of a March that will see 18 games crammed into 31 days before it’s over. The Knicks are a team that could desperately use some practice time together yet now never seem to practice, strangled by a Catch-22; are you better off practicing today or resting today? D’Antoni chose rest. No one would argue.
And yet resting won’t make the players seem less like strangers.
“I can’t remember a time when I played so many games so close together,” Amar’e Stoudemire said. “I think it’s starting to catch up to us.”
In a lot of ways, in their words and in their actions and in the way every day seems to turn quickly into “Groundhog Day,” the Knicks conjure some chilling New York memories, because the slide in which the Knicks find themselves is starting to feel, and reek, an awful lot like the epic flume ride the Mets went on in September of 2007.
The thing about that joyless collapse was that for the first half of it, it didn’t feel like much of a crash at all, just a malaise. The Mets were losing games, sure, and they were watching the Phillies slice into what had been a 71/2-game lead daily, but everyone around the team kept thinking the same thing: All we need is a win or two. That will stop the bleeding. That will get things turned around.
Only the wins never came. The bleeding never stopped.
And we all know how that ended.
The Knicks aren’t truly in danger of falling out of the playoffs. Yet. Even with another loss last night, their eighth in 10 games, the seventh-place Knicks still hold a four-game loss-column lead over the Pacers in eighth, still hold a six-game lead over the Bucks and Bobcats in ninth. The Bucks come to the Garden tomorrow night. It might not be a bad idea for the Knicks to win that game.
Win, and maybe stop the bleeding.
Because they are very much in danger of falling into that ’07 Mets rabbit hole. After a while, losses no longer become singular, isolated incidents, they become dramatic referendums on all that is right — or mostly wrong — with the State of the Team.
It’s impossible to play well when things become so chronically toxic, when every misstep looms as something more than it is. It doesn’t matter that the Knicks, as constituted before the All-Star Game, were all of two games north of .500.
It’s true that they haven’t been the same since Chauncey Billups’ thigh collided with Dwight Howard’s knee a month ago, and Stoudemire, so stout and so reliable most of the year, suddenly seems to be playing on 65-year-old knees, and last night missed 14 of his first 16 shots.
They keep talking about having time to regroup, time to find themselves, and it’s true. They still have a magic number of but six to qualify for the playoffs, which at this point seems like it will be an elephant off their backs. All they need is a win or two.
Simple, right?
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com