The Knicks have a new Mike, but the same old bad habits as the playoffs approach.
With 24 games remaining last season, Mike D’Antoni resigned as his run-and-gun style with little emphasis on defense was not working with this team. Assistant Mike Woodson took over and the team played with more effort over the rest of that regular season and the start of this one.
But now with 28 games left in this season, the Knicks are reverting to their lackadaisical play on defense and have gone 16-15 over their past 31 games.
“You don’t just purge from one year to the next with a lot of the same personnel of those habits just ’cause you make a coaching change and a couple of guys decide they are going to play harder defensively. It’s more than that,” ESPN analyst Tim Legler said.
“It’s something that you constantly have to fight to not allow those things to creep in and I think it’s the kind of thing that Mike Woodson is at the point now as we are getting close to the playoffs where he needs to spend all of his time preparing his team defensively, all of his time in the team room calling guys out.”
During the Knicks’ 18-5 start, they had a pair of 20-point wins over the Heat, who they welcome back to the Garden on Sunday for the first time since their season opener.
For much of the first half of the season, which also included a sweep of the best-in-basketball Spurs, the Knicks were seen as the biggest challenger to Miami for the top spot in the Eastern Conference. While Legler did not think the blame should go all on Carmelo Anthony, Legler did say it was up to the Knicks’ star to lead a resurgence.
“In the last 28 games, he has to be at the forefront of making guys understand that I am going to defend my position and give you 6-10 rebounds every night, which is what he was doing at the beginning of the year,” Legler said. “I am going to set the tone now. Focusing on why they haven’t played well defensively brings too much negativity.”
Now the goal, as the schedule turns brutal for the final two months of the season, might be just holding onto home-court advantage in the first round. The Knicks have been passed by the Pacers with the Nets, Hawks and Bulls all closing in. The positive is the Knicks have proven they can play with the best in the league and a lack of effort and hustle is fixable and better than a lack of talent, which is what plagued the Knicks for years before Amar’e Stoudemire arrived and Anthony followed.
“It’s something tangible you can point to that’s correctable,” Legler said. “[Effort on defense] is what separates teams that win consistently in this league from teams that rely on putting the ball in the basket because those are teams that are never going to win anything substantial because that’s a fleeting thing. That comes and goes every night, the defensive constant should be there every night.”