NBA

New-look Knicks look different every night

ORLANDO, Fla. — It’s been a week. You believe that? In a town that’s been falling hard for the Knicks again, rediscovering its basketball jones, it seems impossible, feels like it’s been a month-long Tilt-A-Whirl already.

But it’s true: A week ago tonight was the first time the new-look Knicks were put on display. One week. Seven days. Four games. Two wins. And now two losses.

With a thousand rises and dips in the roller coaster to come.

“We’re still finding out about ourselves,” Amar’e Stoudemire said last night. “Still finding out about ourselves as a team. This is to be expected.”

What you got last night from these Knicks was a 48-minute microcosm of what you’ve gotten for seven days and what you’ll get for the next seven weeks and beyond — moments when you wonder if they even speak the same basketball language, and moments when they play the game so effortlessly, so artfully, you wonder if they’ll ever lose again.

Sometimes on back-to-back possessions.

Sometimes on the same possession.

“We have to tighten up a lot of things,” Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni said after the Knicks saw a 11-point halftime lead melt away at Amway Center last night, saw the Magic come roaring back and clip them 116-110, scoring 69 second-half points in the process and maybe knocking Chauncey Billups out of commission for a bit. “We’ll have to get a little bit better, without a doubt.”

The queasiest part of the night came late, after the Magic already had come all the way back, after Jameer Nelson had engaged Billups in a classic one-on-one battle and scored 11 points in a key two-minute burst that tilted the game Orlando’s way for good. With just under 2 ½ minutes to go, Billups was chasing Nelson around a Dwight Howard screen, and Howard’s knee planted deep in Billups’ thigh.

“I’ve gotten kneed before, but not like that,” Billups said later, visibly limping, favoring the injured left leg that surely puts him in peril of missing tonight’s game at the Garden vs. New Orleans, and a certain point guard named Chris Paul. “You know when I come out of the game at that juncture something’s wrong.”

So there is that sour subtext to take from the game. And there is this, too: If we aren’t ready to christen a lineup of Stoudemire, Anthony and a healthy Billips a “Big Three” just yet, well, they clearly are three equally alpha dogs out there, and for the game they were responsible for 85 of the Knicks’ 110 points.

That’s a whole lot of top-heavy. And for now, the immediate ramifications seem clear. Landry Fields, who found it easy to establish himself in the Knicks’ previous one-star-and-a-gaggle-of-co-stars lineup, looks far more tentative now. Shawne Williams and Bill Walker, who were key fourth-quarter contributors against Miami, looked a few steps slow.

And defensively … well, the Magic are good.

But they aren’t that good. Especially with Hedo Turkoglu missing all but 12 minutes and 8 seconds with foul trouble and ejection. And so ended a three-game trip that gave you three different looks to the new-look Knicks.

1. Losing an unloseable game in Cleveland.

2. Winning an unwinnable game in Miami.

3. Losing a game that looked eminently winnable, even if it had seemed eminently loseable on the schedule in Orlando.

Got that?

Yeah. That’s what the Knicks are now, what they will be for the foreseeable future. Good enough in stretches to make you think about what warm-weather basketball used to feel like. Bad enough in stretches that you keep checking to see what Philadelphia and Indiana and Charlotte are doing, just to be safe. With a daily reality that lies somewhere in the middle.

And someplace different every day.

“Sometimes what you see is the product of us only being together for a couple of days,” said Billups, ever the veteran, ever the realist. “But sometimes it’s just not playing good enough, too. I think you see a little bit of both out there.”

And will continue to do so, until further notice.