Jalen Brunson said a lot with just a few words.
“We just have to pay a little more attention to what we’re doing,” Brunson said. “It has to mean something more to us.”
For a team that entered the season with expectations of the NBA Finals or failure, there shouldn’t be a question at mid-year whether the players care or not. But a lack of “effort” was a concerning theme in the locker room after the Knicks’ 114-97 loss to the Mavericks Monday night at Madison Square Garden.
It’s not so much talent or schematic issues currently plaguing the Knicks. It’s something at a more basic level that threatens to derail their season after losing nine of their past 11 games and snapping a four-game skid.
Josh Hart made a stark comparison between this year’s team and last year’s after Monday’s game. A year ago, he said, the Knicks could shoot poorly or overcome offensive displays with grit, physicality and defensive intensity. They could, to put it simply, overwork teams. But he has seen that trait disappear this year.
Most of the staff, apart from some changes to the bank, is the same. So what explains the difference?
“I don’t know. If I could answer that question, I don’t think we would be having this conversation right now,” Hart said Tuesday. “We just have to play with more energy and more physicality. You see how teams play. When we played in Phoenix the other day, they picked guys up, they made guys uncomfortable on every possession, and that’s something we don’t do. We don’t do that until the second half and we’re down 15, and we’ve got to try to make a comeback. We’ve got to figure out how to do that the whole game. Start the game and keep it going.”
“[Tuesday’s practice] felt like ass. We were just embarrassed. We were booed on our home field. It’s not more embarrassing than that. And we’ll see how we respond [Wednesday against the Nets]. The way we played was not up to our standard and, as I said, embarrassing. We have to fix that, no one is going to fix it for us. We have to dig ourselves out of the hole we’ve created. We have the opportunity to do it, but now we have to stop talking and get out there and do it.
Tom Thibodeau had long earned a reputation for making his teams play hard and outsmarting opponents. Mike Brown had this year’s team playing hard in the NBA Cup, but has failed to light a fire in them during this recession.
“It’s hard to compare,” Hart said. “Thibs was here for what, four or five years? And built that identity over time. And what you saw last year and the year before was more set in stone. Now it’s the same group of guys, but it’s a new philosophy, a new coach, a new system, new voices. So it’s going to take time to really forge and build that. And you can really only forge and build that through adversity. In the sense that we’re going through this adverse situation, it’s a great opportunity to build.”
Miles McBride suggested Monday that the Knicks were riding too high after winning the NBA Cup and took their foot off the gas pedal. A day later, Brunson said “that could be part of it.” They are 7-11 since the Cup and are now just a game and a half above the play-in.
The first half of Monday’s loss was a new low of the season, giving up 75 points to a decimated Mavericks team. At halftime, Brown said he didn’t talk much about X’s and O’s. Instead, he challenged them to “do your damn job.”
The Knicks outscored the Mavericks by 11 points in the second half. Brown attributed it entirely to better effort.
“We didn’t change anything schematically in the second half,” Brown said Tuesday. “And there were more clips in terms of showing the film that we took from the second half than from the first half that showed we were doing our job the right way. The way they talk, the way we talk, the way we drill the film, the way we look at it. We had more opportunities – clips that showed positives in the second half than in the first half, and that can’t be the case. We have to try to do it for 48 minutes.”
Real contenders shouldn’t talk so much about desire and effort. But just over halfway through the year, that’s where the Knicks find themselves.
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