Jalen Brunson said a whole lot with just a few words.
“We know what we have to do,” he said after Knicks practice Tuesday, “and we will do it if we care.”
For a team that entered the season with NBA Finals-or-bust expectations, it should not be a question midway through the year if 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 on Monday night at Madison Square Garden.
It’s not so much talent or schematic issues that are plaguing the Knicks right now. It’s something at a more baseline level that is threatening to derail their season, having lost nine of their past 11 games and riding a four-game skid.
“We just have to care about what we are doing,” Brunson said. “We just need a little more from us.”
Josh Hart, after Monday’s game, made a pointed comparison between this year’s team and last year’s. A year ago, he said, the Knicks could overcome poor shooting or offensive showings with grit, physicality and defensive intensity. They could, to put it simply, outwork teams. But he has seen that trait dissipate this year.
Most of the personnel, other than some changes to the bench, is the same. So what explains the difference?
“I don’t know. If I could answer that question, I don’t think we’d be having this conversation right now,” Hart said Tuesday. “We just have to play with more energy, more physicality. You see how teams play, when we played recently in Phoenix, they picked guys up, they made guys uncomfortable on every possession, and that’s something that we don’t do. We don’t do that until the second half and we’re down 15 and we gotta try and make a comeback. We have to figure out how to do that for the whole game. Start the game and sustain it.
“[Tuesday’s practice] felt like ass. We just got embarrassed. We got booed on our home court. It’s not more embarrassing than that. And we’ll see how we respond [Wednesday against the Nets]. How we’ve been playing has not been up to our caliber and like I said, embarrassing. We have to fix that, no one’s gonna fix it for us. We gotta dig ourselves out of the hole that we made. We have the capability of doing it, but now we have to stop talking and go out there and do it.”
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Tom Thibodeau had long built a reputation for getting his teams to play hard and outwork opponents. Mike Brown had this year’s team playing hard through the NBA Cup, but hasn’t been able to light a fire in them during this downturn.
“It’s hard to compare,” Hart said. “Thibs was here for what, four or five years? And built that identity over a period of time. And what you saw last year and the year before, it 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 gonna take time to really forge and build that. And you 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 1 ½ games above the play-in.
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The first half of Monday’s loss was a new low point of this 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. He instead challenged them to “do your f–king job.”
The Knicks outscored the Mavericks by 11 points in the second half. Brown chalked it up entirely to better effort.
“We didn’t change anything schematically in the second half,” Brown said Tuesday. “And there were more clips when it comes to showing the film that we pulled from the second half than the first half, that showed us doing our job the right way. The way that they talk about, the way that we talk about, the way that we drill it, the way that we watch it. We had more opportunities — clips that showed positives in the second half than the first half, and that can’t be the case. We have to try to do it for 48 minutes.”
True contenders shouldn’t be talking this much about desire and effort. But, just over halfway through the year, that’s where the Knicks find themselves.
