Well, then. That was certainly a sobering couple of hours at the world’s most famous arena.
Every time the Knicks have slipped on a banana peel this season, there was always an explanation: This player was out. That player was out. The other team was better, more rested, not playing a back-to-back. There hadn’t been that many slips, truth be told, which is how they were still 15 games over .500 stepping onto the Garden floor last night through 49 games.
They walked off 14-over after 50.
And suddenly it isn’t a reach to wonder if we haven’t already seen the best of the Knicks this year. This 92-88 loss is that concerning, that upsetting if you still harbor the belief that the Knicks remain the equivalent of the East No. 2 seed they still carry into the All-Star break with them.
Even if it’s never seemed more tenuous.
“I’ve got to sit the next three or four days and think about these last two losses,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said, maybe half an hour after the final boos had dissolved and the last disgruntled customer had vanished behind the Garden walls. “We’ve got to get back and try to figure out how to get back to where we were early in the season.”
Suddenly you have to wonder what the Knicks have in them across the season’s final 32 games, starting next Wednesday night in Indianapolis against a Pacers team that clearly believes it’s every bit worthy of that 2 seed as the Knicks are. And it will continue forward, all the way through a March that promises to be a hellacious gauntlet for the Knicks with 18 games in 31 days, 10 of them on the road, five of them on the West Coast.
Suddenly you have to ask a simple question:
Are the Knicks as good as their record?
And the problem with asking that question is it’s not likely you’re going to much care for the answer.
“You’ve got to beat the teams you’re supposed to beat,” Amar’e Stoudemire said. “And that should’ve been a win for us.”
Except as the weeks progress, as the Knicks regress, it’s becoming abundantly clear the margin between positive and negative, between success and failure, is even more razor thin than we’d imagined. This is the time of year when they should be starting to blossom, with Stoudemire now almost six weeks into his season, Iman Shumpert almost a month, with Ray Felton fully up to speed running the offense again.
Except they’ve never looked more jagged, more ragged, more inconsistent, more unpredictable. Against the Raptors, now 21-32, it shouldn’t matter that Carmelo Anthony banged up his shooting hand and couldn’t find his shot all night. The Knicks have won with Melo playing a reduced role, and they should certainly beat the last-place team in the division at home.
But, then, they shouldn’t miss as many lay-ups (at least six, maybe more) as they did. They shouldn’t miss nine free throws. On a night when they out-rebounded the Raptors by some 17 boards — including 20-8 on the offensive glass — there is no good explanation why they found themselves down nine early in the fourth quarter after being up 11 midway through the second.
Outscored by 20? At home? To the Raptors?
“We were aggressive, communicating, and excited to play and we haven’t done that the last 12 games,” J.R. Smith said.
They’d better start doing that. The Knicks have worked hard to get where they’ve gotten through 50 games, walk into the break still three games in the loss column clear of everyone else (excepting Miami) in the East for the 2 seed. But that can vanish in a hurry. The games get tougher and the stakes higher very soon. If the past few games are an aberration, now would be a good time to prove it.
“I think we still have a legitimate shot,” Woodson said, asked if he believed the Knicks are still title contenders. “We’re still sitting at the top of our division and still fighting. We could’ve lost that a long time ago.”
But the fight is just beginning. If the Knicks are interested in surviving it, they’d better come back from the break looking a lot more like the team that cruised through the season’s first 25 games than the one that’s limped across the last 25.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com