LOS ANGELES — Of course there will be grumbling, and hand-wringing, and much public debate about what happened to the Knicks in California the past two nights. All the ingredients were there:
1. The opportunity for a first 3-0 start in over a decade.
2. Lots of eyeballs, up late on weeknights; the Warriors game Wednesday drawing the largest rating of any Knicks West Coast game since 2000.
3. Two brutal losses, low-lighted by perfectly morose fourth-quarter collapses.
You add that up, you get a postmortem that feels like an entire basketball city slapping its forehead with a collective palm. Such is the price the Knicks will pay for mattering again. How many games just like the last two, did they play from 2001 through 2010, anonymous losses lost in a blurry decade of despair? Can you remember five of them?
Three? Even one?
“We weren’t very good out there tonight,” Mike D’Antoni sneered when Wednesday’s debacle was over. “No excuses. We just didn’t do anything right.”
He wasn’t any happier last night, not after the Lakers outclassed his team 99-82, running away in the fourth quarter after the Knicks had actually made a willful attempt to keep things close through 36 minutes.
He will surely be joined by a chorus of disbelievers now, even those who know enough not to make any definitive determinations about anything after all of three games. Here’s the thing though: While logic screams that it’s lunacy to line the boulevards with panic after only 144 minutes’ worth of season, the Knicks are dealing with something else.
Look, the Celtics lost their third straight game to start the season a few hours before the Warriors took out the Knicks Wednesday, but in Boston they understand the Celtics will be fine. They’ll get Paul Pierce back, comfortably ease into the playoffs and take their chances one last time with a championship-tested core.
Even in Los Angeles, where the post-lockout air has been fraught with angst and betrayal, there seemed little reason to worry about the Lakers. They didn’t get Chris Paul, did trade Lamar Odom, will soon welcome back Andrew Bynum and like the Celtics, have a vast culture of success to draw upon over the season.
What the Knicks have is unknown, and what they build, game to game, week to week, is fragile and unknown. It sure seems as if they have assembled the best frontline in the sport, and that there are enough lousy teams lined up like a buffet table over the next few weeks and months that they can learn to win regularly even as they work out the kinks and work in the new personnel.
Seems like it. But we don’t know. Not really.
And that is the towering concern about this basketball season for the Knicks, because — let’s be honest — this is it. This, for better or worse, is what the franchise has decided to move forward with. There will be no Chris Paul. There will be no Deron Williams. There will be no Derrick Rose, or Tyreke Evans, or Kyrie Irving wandering through the front doors.
This is how they’ve built themselves. This is about performance now, not potential. It’s about winning today, not building for the future. Past missteps always had a caveat: they were still recovering from the post-Patrick Ewing malaise. They were rebuilding. They were dealing with a devastating injury. They were clearing salary cap space for a star. They were saving more cap space for a second star.
There was always something to point forward to, somewhere Out There.
But Out There doesn’t exist any more. At some point, these Knicks are going to have to figure out a way not to succumb to atmosphere and emotion.
They’re going to have to emulate the Heat, who won a game in Charlotte on Wednesday they had no business winning, one they wouldn’t have won last year, one the Knicks aren’t ready to win this year.
This has to work, if not immediately, then soon enough. Because the alternative is far too grim to imagine.