Wednesday night was a debacle for the Knicks at the Garden, and after they had a meeting and practice yesterday, coach Mike D’Antoni stressed that the team needs to improve mentally.
D’Antoni, who said he figures to move point guard Chris Duhon back into the starting lineup tonight, believes his team will be ready to play against the Kings after an awful 115-89 loss to the Nets.
But he made telling comments that he believes the Knicks’ ball movement needs to improve, the team gets easily distracted and the club needs to get “tougher.”
“We’ve just got to move the ball better,” D’Antoni said. “Just everything. [Wednesday] night we could have thrown a dart at a board and picked up something that didn’t work. . . . But again, we’ve just got to get stronger mentally. We’ve got to get tougher.”
D’Antoni stressed that the Knicks can’t lose their cool when things aren’t going their way.
“It’s so easy for us to get distracted by a bad call, by somebody [forcing] a shot up, that somebody didn’t rotate,” he said. “We get distracted. And it lingers about three or four plays, and that’s when you’re mature enough to go over to a teammate and just say, ‘You messed up there.’ Then that’s it. And then go on. But we let it linger a little bit and we get distracted really easy, and a hardened team or a veteran team does not succumb to those types of mistakes.”
Forward David Lee echoed his coach.
“I think a lot of times for whatever reason when we made a few bad plays or [Vince] Carter was hitting a 3 from half-court and you would kind of get the wind taken out of you a little bit,” Lee said. “And I saw myself on the film doing the same thing where you kind of drop your head a little bit.”
The Knicks (28-39) trail the Bulls by three games for the eighth seed in the East, though they’re also behind the Bucks, Bobcats and Nets. The Knicks have 15 games left and face a Kings team tonight with the worst record in the NBA at 14-54.
D’Antoni, who said the team lacked energy on Wednesday, expects things to be better tonight even if he can’t promise that the Knicks will actually play well.
“We’re going to be ready to go,” he said. “That’ll be a surprise if we’re not ready to go. . . . They understand they messed up.”
D’Antoni labeled yesterday as “a nice meeting,” saying the team “tried to air out some things.” He insisted meetings like that have happened on several occasions this year.
As for the bad ball movement, Lee said the Knicks have to “get back to playing unselfish basketball.” Part of Duhon’s job in his return to starting point guard will be to change that. Duhon missed two games because of a sore back, then came off the bench Wednesday to back up Nate Robinson. Duhon, who played 30 minutes and scored six points, said he believes the rest made a difference.
*
Al Harrington sat out practice with a sore left Achilles, though D’Antoni expects him to play. Eddy Curry missed practice to attend a custody hearing in Chicago for his three-year-old son, who survived the attack that claimed the lives of Curry’s infant daughter and the child’s mother in January.