BOSTON — There’s one door separating the TD Garden corridor leading from the visiting head coach’s press conference room to the long hallway leading to the Celtics’ media area.
Outside that door is an adjacent space with a sign that reads “Family Room.”
Today, the family room is the final stop in the makeshift kids’ museum — a winding, 25-step stretch of hallway tattered with children’s artwork.
Fifteen different pieces of colored construction paper line the wall with messages like “Let’s go Celtics” and “Make every day feel like Christmas.” One sheet sketches a face with the caption: “Touch to make a wish.”
But one piece of paper stands out.
It’s white — the only white page on a black wall — creating stark contrast.
On it, a squiggly black line separates the words “Celtics” on the left from “Knicks” on the right.
At the top, in uneven handwriting, the paper reads “How won.” The misspelling is secondary to its meaning.
Under Celtics: three tally marks.
Under Knicks: zero.
And across the museum wall, the words “Don’t touch” appear in four different places.
How fitting. Because for the third time this season, the Knicks provided more evidence they can’t touch the Celtics with a 94-foot pole — and with one more regular-season meeting looming, the road to a title will almost certainly run through the very courts where they’ve been run off time and time again.
The Knicks walked onto TD Garden’s parquet floor already holding a minus-50 point differential against Boston this season, courtesy of a 23-point loss on opening night, followed by a 27-point blowout on Feb. 8
And after Sunday’s 118-105 loss, that margin has ballooned to minus-63.
The only reason it wasn’t worse? A third-quarter push that briefly cut a 27-point deficit to four. But the reigning champs promptly reasserted control, opening the fourth quarter with a 16-4 run in just four minutes to put the game back out of reach.
That’s what the Knicks want to focus on: the third quarter — the one thing they actually did well in a game that once again showed the gap between New York and the NBA’s elite.
“Whatever we did in the first, second and fourth quarter doesn’t really matter,” team captain Jalen Brunson said at his locker after the game. “The third quarter, what we showed was how we can play and how we can compete and how we can … the way we stepped up in the third is how we should play.”
Compete? Maybe.
Contend? No.
The Knicks are not championship contenders.
Not after back-to-back decisive losses to the only two teams ahead of them in the Eastern Conference standings.
They’re now 0-3 against the Celtics, 0-2 against the No. 1-seeded Cavaliers, and 0-2 against the West-leading Thunder.
Seven games. Seven losses to the only teams in the league boasting better records.
And it’s not just that they’re losing. It’s that other than the third quarter in Boston, and save for the first go-round against Cleveland, none of these games have been close.
If the Knicks don’t look like they belong — it’s because they don’t.
“We’re not trying to close a gap with the Boston Celtics,” Josh Hart said postgame. “They’re the champs for a reason. They got All-NBA guys, they got All-Stars, they got a heck of a team. So we’re not trying to close the gap on them. We’re trying to make sure we get ourselves to where we need to be at the end of the year.”
But where is that? Where do the Knicks need to be at the end of the regular season? And can they get there with the roster as currently constructed?
They will surely get a big boost when their only defensive anchor in Mitchell Robinson returns to make his season debut after offseason ankle surgery. But the weight of a storied franchise’s championship hopes is a heavy burden to bear for a player coming off two surgeries to the same ankle in one season.
Yet the Knicks were built to contend this season. At least that was the intention, the method to their madness.
They traded five first-round picks for Mikal Bridges. They shipped out Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo for Karl-Anthony Towns to raise their ceiling.
Instead, the ceiling is looking more like a hard cap — and that’s no pun intended to their suffocating relationship with the second apron.
New York outscored Boston 39-25 in the third quarter, which would’ve been impressive had the Celtics not doubled them, 39-18, in the opening period. The Knicks didn’t touch 25 points in any quarter outside of the third.
And more impressive than the Knicks’ late push?
How quickly the Celtics ended it.
It took Boston just four minutes to undo two quarters of New York’s effort.
“It’s great to have something to look back on to see what was successful against a great team, the defending champions. But there’s no moral victories in this, especially for us being in New York,” said All-Star center Karl-Anthony Towns, who finished with 24 points and 18 rebounds. “We have to get the job done. We’ll learn. We’ll have to be better. And we’ll have to implement these things we did today that worked.”
Sure, it was better than the complete no-shows in Games 1 and 2 against the Celtics. And it was far more competitive than Friday’s 37-point drubbing at the hands of the Cavaliers.
But it was still a game the Knicks fought tooth and nail only to still come up short via double-digit margin.
The Knicks are running out of time to prove they belong.
Seven games against championship contenders. Seven losses separating the best from the rest.
And one white piece of paper with squiggly lines and tally marks serving as a stark reminder of just how far the Knicks have to go if they hope to one day adorn the Madison Square Garden rafters with a banner that reads “NBA champions.”
“[We have to] just try to find a way to win. We’ve done in the past against other teams, but it’s the first time we did it against this team,” said Brunson. “We can do it, but we have to do it for four quarters.”
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