Five games. Four cities. A week and a half on the road.
A quick pit stop at home, then straight into a back-to-back.
That’s eight flights — counting the trip home at the end — four time zone changes, and eight games in 14 days.
That’s just the bold lettering. Now for the fine print: The Knicks’ grueling Wednesday-Thursday back-to-back in San Antonio and Charlotte marked their 14th and 15th games since the All-Star break. Eleven of those have been on the road.
The Knicks haven’t just been playing your average NBA schedule. They’ve been living out of suitcases, hopping city to city, and battling exhaustion in arenas that aren’t their own.
It’s a brutal stretch for any team, and the Knicks are feeling it.
“The schedule is the schedule,” head coach Tom Thibodeau said after Wednesday’s loss in San Antonio. “Sometimes it’s in your favor, sometimes it’s not. We’ve been on the road a long time, and home for one, then turn right back around — but that’s our reality.”
The reality on Wednesday? The Knicks got blown out by a Spurs team missing Victor Wembanyama, De’Aaron Fox and Gregg Popovich. A shorthanded lottery-bound team in the West, and yet the Knicks trailed by as many as 28 points before the final buzzer mercifully sealed a 120-105 defeat — their first loss of the season to any of the league’s bottom-four teams.
The loss reeked of exhaustion, fatigue creeping in from a relentless schedule that has zapped the energy of a team that had been brimming with it after the All-Star break.
“We knew this one was gonna be tough: A young, hungry team [that] plays fast,” Josh Hart said. “Obviously we’ve had a tough schedule the last couple weeks — going on the road a week and a half, come back [home], [play a] national TV game, and then go right into a back-to-back. So it’s tough to a degree.”
The fatigue showed itself early — and often — on the offensive end. While Karl-Anthony Towns got hot, scoring New York’s first nine points and 19 through the first half, the rest of the Knicks starters shot 0-of-14 in the opening period and just 3-of-24 through the first two quarters.
“I think it was just our energy,” said Towns, who finished with 32 points and 9 rebounds on 11-of-21 shooting. “We just didn’t play to the capabilities that I know we all can. We came out flat. We fought a little bit back in the second half, but they were hitting shots.”
Hart pointed to mental fatigue as the bigger issue. The NBA already has a more travel-heavy cadence than its pro sports counterparts in football and baseball. The schedule-makers compounded matters by handing the Knicks seven road games in an eight-game stretch, including two sets of road back-to-backs.
“The biggest thing about the NBA is the travel,” Hart told reporters. “That’s the toughest thing. We’re in the dog days of the season, so you know your body’s already gonna be tired. You’ve gotta get going, and you’ve gotta find it mentally.
“[We’re] a little bit drained mentally, but we’ve gotta make sure we regroup. We’ve got another tough one tomorrow with a team that plays extremely fast, and we’re on a back-to-back, and we’re losing now, so we’ve got certain things schedule-wise against us, but we’ve gotta make sure we pick it up.”
While the schedule has undeniably played a role in the Knicks’ struggles, Towns refused to let it become a crutch.
“Nah. I don’t wanna start that [narrative],” he said. “We’re a hell of a ball club, and we know what we can do, and we’ve shown the world what we can do. “We just didn’t do what we needed to do in the first half. We fought really hard in the second half but we just didn’t get the job done.”
The Knicks will hop on another flight immediately after Thursday’s game in Charlotte, where they’ll take on the Hornets in the second leg of a back-to-back. Then, finally, they return home for five of their next six games at Madison Square Garden.
But before they can exhale, they’ll have to survive what could turn into a track meet against the young, fast-paced Hornets. A loss in Charlotte would mark New York’s sixth in its last nine games,
“Just go in with the right mindset. That’s the challenge,” said Thibodeau. “That’s what competition’s all about. Your mind is everything. So if you believe you can do something, you will.”
