The record is 19-30 now and there is no white-washing that, no camouflaging it. Forty-nine games isn’t a sliver of a season, or a taste, or a sample size; it is 60 percent of the season. This is serious. This is, as the Knicks are fond of saying, “urgent.”
“We should’ve had urgency for a long time now,” Amar’e Stoudemire said late Wednesday night, after the Knicks added that 30th loss to the pile, 94-90 to a Blazers team that really does play with urgency, even though they are now 21 games over .500. “We need to get into a winning mentality.”
Here’s the problem: it may well be too late for that. All year there has been a sense around the Knicks that they are one extended winning streak away from re-settling the season, from recalibrating themselves into postseason contenders, it was a November narrative and a December declaration and a New Year’s Resolution …
And, now, a February folly.
Sixty percent of the season down, and it would surprise nobody if the next extended skein was a 10-game losing skid and not a 10-game winning streak. Forget the assumptions we’ve long held about the bare minimum this team is capable of, that surely they’d find a way to eke in, that there’s enough time to make a climb to the six spot, or to five.
At this point, thinking that way is essentially as delusional as some of the things the Knicks are saying now, starting with Ray Felton, another poor game in the books, who described the last two losses, at Milwaukee and Tuesday night, thusly: “The positive thing is we’re playing well. We’re just not pulling through.”
Said Carmelo Anthony: “We’ve been down this road before.”
But the road is different now. The woeful Eastern Conference, upon which the Knicks have pinned so many of their hopes, is starting to establish a genuine separation between haves and have-nots – and the Knicks are presently on the wrong side of that boundary, and rapidly losing radio contact.
“I don’t like losing,” Tyson Chandler said. “Losing is not something I’ll ever get accustomed to, or ever enjoy.”
But it is impossible to escape this simple fact now, as the losses pile up, as the deficit grows, as the Knicks play .388 ball, as they stubbornly refuse to make a run at .500, let alone the No. 8 seed:
They are a team utterly besieged by self-doubt, lacking any semblance of self-confidence, a team that is now defined by the hole it dug for itself before the season was even 20 games old. Back then, it really WAS early. Back then, there really was time to answer for those early sins.
Now?
Now, for the first time, it really is hard to conceive of the Knicks making the playoffs. They have meandered between eight and 12 games under .500 for months; as bad as the East has been, it’s going to take better than 37-45 or 35-47 to make it. Maybe – maybe – the magic number will be 39-43.
And ask yourself this: can you see the Knicks winning 20 of their final 33 games? Can you see them winning 60 percent of their remaining games, after seeing how they’ve stumbled around the first 60 percent of the season?
Especially the way they play so often now, looking like a team fully aware of the task that lies ahead, fully expecting the other Nike to drop in every fourth quarter of every game, a never-ending self-fulfilling prophecy?
They are pressing now, every night, every game, every missed shot feeling like the equal of three, every slippery possession seeming like imminent collapse, every blown defense hinting at disarray.
And it isn’t just theoretical. Anthony blew his stack and earned a fourth-quarter technical when one more 50-50 call went against him, all but throwing his hands in the air afterward and declaring it “one of them nights.” And Woodson, the vise starting to tighten around his tenure, pursued Danny Crawford afterward, his one printable observation for the veteran ref: “Hey, Danny, I hope you sleep well tonight.”
There is no such peace awaiting the Knicks, not unless there is a Hollywood-level turnaround in their future. Forty-nine games in, 60 percent home, it really does seem the Knicks are less in need of a new coach or a new approach as they are a screenwriter with a working delete key and a healthy imagination.
And who knows if even that would be enough.