Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

NBA

Knicks’ playoff hopes can go from slim to none in a hurry

MEMPHIS — So the Knicks begin the bell lap of their season as they will spend so much of it: On the road, away from New York City, away from Madison Square Garden. Maybe that’s not a bad thing; even Otter, Bluto and D-Day treated Delta House with more care than the Knicks have treated their home this year.

“We’ve got to string some games together,” J.R. Smith said late Monday afternoon, and that’s one way of kindly defining the task that lays before the Knicks when they start the final 30-game push of this dyspeptic season beginning Tuesday night against the Grizzlies at the FedEx Forum.

The Knicks can’t necessarily get themselves back into serious playoff contention with the four games in five nights that await them. But they can absolutely play themselves out of the race permanently, and quickly. They have already spotted the playoff field 2 ½ games.

That number can swell pretty easily and pretty quickly. The datelines won’t necessarily be daunting — at Memphis, at New Orleans, at Orlando, at Atlanta, four teams who are a combined 23 games under .500 — but the mission is. Because every time you try to guess where the Knicks are headed you always use a familiar formula — this team isn’t good, that team is terrible, this could be a win, that should be a loss — and you have to remind yourself of something:

Teams look at the Knicks the same way. They are 20-32. They have been abysmal for much of the season. They are a lot closer to the 9-43 Bucks in the standings than they are to the 40-12 Pacers. To look at any game on the schedule and circle it with a “W” is not only preposterous, but delusional.

Yet they’ll play those 30 games anyway.

For better, and for worse, and for whatever may qualify as worse than worse.

“I think everyone knows what’s at stake,” said Mike Woodson, who was the first Knick off the bus when the team arrived at Rhodes College for its first post-break practice proving one more time that, if nothing else, his bosses are as patient as they portend to be. “There’s a lot of basketball left. But there’s not a lot of room for error. We have to play each game like it’s our last game.”

That sounds nice, but Woodson has issued similar sound bites for weeks on end, and the message has yet to manifest itself in any kind of sustained dalliance with competence. And if it doesn’t happen soon, then any of these games may well be Woodson’s last game.

“We’re running out of games,” he said.

The hard part of what lies before the Knicks is the relentless way the schedule will attack them, eight back-to-backs to go, 30 games between now and the second week of April, only 11 of them at home. Most seasons, you go on a trip like this and think: we break even, we’ll take it.

But if the Knicks break even, it means they’ll return to New York exactly where they are now: 12 games under .500, no closer to the 8 seed, and with only 26 games left. They evaporate quickly, especially when you need a serious streak somewhere ahead: eight in a row, or 12 out of 14, or 20 out of 25.

And ask yourself: based on what you’ve seen of the Knicks so far this year, can you envision eight in a row? Twelve out of 14? Twenty out of 25?

“Most of us started the season thinking we’d be in the hunt,” Woodson said, and the hunt in question didn’t include the Pistons and Bobcats and Cavaliers, but the Pacers and the Heat and the Nets. “Not jockeying just to get in the playoffs.”

But here they are. Realistically they probably need to win 18 of their final 30 to get in, which means playing the final 30 games at a .600 clip when they’ve played the first 52 in .385. Does this team have the heart to grind that out? It may not be the storyline any of us expected to follow with them. But it’s all we’ve got left.