Confession clearly is good for the soul.
“Both of us stink,” Jason Kidd said Tuesday night, asked about Thursday’s Barclays Center showdown between the Knicks and the Nets, the Gangs Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (Or Rebound … Or Guard Anyone … Or Make Clutch Shots … )
“We do!” Carmelo Anthony said a little too enthusiastically when related Kidd’s assessment. “He wasn’t lying about that.”
And then, a few moments later, turning his attention solely to the Knicks and reaching for an extra canister of gasoline, he added this:
“We’re the laughingstock of the league.”
And he isn’t lying about that, either.
So since everyone is rolling themselves under their respective buses, “Mannix” style, and since we’re going to rip just about everybody over the final 600 or so words of this column, I should probably start with this sentence:
“This should be for an early stake of first place.”
That was your humble narrator, writing only 37 days ago, forecasting the first of these four Knicks-Nets games that will take place Thursday night at Barclays Center. OK. Maybe that wasn’t an outlandish opinion; as bad as things have been for both teams — and they have been epically bad, comically bad, historically bad — they are both, staggeringly, only two games in the loss column out of first place in the epically, comically, historically wretched Atlantic Division.
This was the part I’d prefer to see wiped clean of Google, Nexis or whatever your search engine of choice: The part where I predicted the Knicks would have 16 losses and the Nets 15 heading into the game … the game they’ll play on Jan. 20, at Madison Square Garden. And the only way that’s going to happen is if the NBA announces it’s contracting about 17 teams immediately and starts handing out forfeits like candy canes.
OK, so now that we’ve immolated your humble narrator and his power of prognostication, let’s turn our attention to the combatants.
And how much time ya got?
“I think both teams feel that they should be better with our record,” Kidd said Wednesday.
“These are two teams whose expectations were high,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said, “and we both have had our struggles.”
The Knicks and Nets will arrive at Barclays with 26 combined losses on their records, a staggering number considering they’ve only played a total of 34 games. Last year, it took until Jan. 7 — a Knicks loss at home to the Celtics in a game better remembered for some charming byplay between Anthony and Kevin Garnett — for the city to witness its 26th shared loss.
So it’s awful, yes. But you knew that. And probably also understand this: For one of these teams, it will get immeasurably worse on the other side of this game. The Knicks have lost nine games in a row, a free fall that has Woodson firmly placed on the firing line less than a year after he had his team explode from the starting gate at 18-5. And the Nets have lost five in a row at home and have the distinct view as a sleepy team and Sleepy Hollow team: unable to sustain 48 minutes of focus, and no discernible leadership.
“We’ve got to start somewhere,” Melo said Wednesday after practice.
“Frustrating times right now,” Garnett said Tuesday after the Nuggets had chased the Nets off their own home floor.
They think it’s frustrating to play these games? Over the first month of the season, the Garden and Barclays have both sounded like a chiropractor’s examination room for all the moaning and groaning and bemoaning that goes on among the most disgusted of the paying customers.
When we were trying to figure out what this pending comedy of catastrophes should be called, it wasn’t hard to come up with nicknames; the trick was stopping yourself from coming up with new ones — BROOKLYN BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS, or SHEEPSHEAD BAY OF PIGS, or BRICKS AT BARCLAYS or SHOWDOWN FROM HELL or CITY SHAME or …
You get the idea. Really the most newsworthy thing is this: One of these teams is actually going to win a game Thursday night.
We think.