A year ago at this point in the season, the Knicks had a record of 40-20. Knicks fans know the rest of it the way they know how to get to Penn Station. The 2024-25 Knicks finished 11-11 from there, still ended up in the Eastern Conference finals, lost to the Pacers and thus didn’t make it to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. After that the owner effectively threw a tantrum, threw out Tom Thibodeau, clearly decided he needed a new coach to get them to the Finals this time. He and Leon Rose finally settled on Mike Brown. Now here we are.
Going into the Spurs game on Sunday afternoon at the Garden, Brown’s Knicks have a record two games worse than Coach Thibs’ Knicks did after 60 games. Not only do the Knicks get the Spurs — a team they beat in that NBA Cup last December — this week, they also go on the road to play the Raptors, come back to the Garden to play the defending champ Thunder, then go back on the road to play the Nuggets and the Lakers.
The season won’t be won or lost or even defined between now and next Sunday. But we might get a better sense by the time they do play the Lakers — having gone up against four straight playoff teams before that — if Brown is going to do what James L. Dolan hired him to do:
Make them better than they were under Thibodeau, the coach who brought the Knicks back from the dark side and made them matter again before getting fired because his team didn’t end up playing the Thunder for the title.
As of right now — and despite a mostly positive stretch this past month — it’s difficult to make the case that they are. Brown’s Knicks also aren’t better than the Pistons in the Eastern Conference. Not better than the Celtics, even though the Celtics don’t have Jayson Tatum, who blew out his Achilles before the Knicks upset the Celtics in the conference semis last spring. Now we’re about to get a snapshot of how the Knicks stack up against three of the league’s elite teams — Spurs, Thunder, Nuggets — over the next seven days.
Jalen Brunson is absolutely still the team’s star, even though no one is calling for him to be the league’s MVP these days. Brunson absolutely played like a star on Friday night against the Bucks, scoring 22 points in the first quarter of what became a blowout game. But Karl-Anthony Towns (who gets blamed for the Knicks not being a powerhouse a lot more than Brown does) has clearly not thrived under this coach the way he did under Thibodeau.
OG Anunoby? He did show up to score 24 against the Bucks after scoring a combined 14 points against the Bulls and Cavs before that while battling a sore toe. But Anunoby’s scoring average is down a couple of points this season. So is Mikal Bridges’. If you have watched Bridges in particular this season and are still under the impression that he is worth the five No. 1 draft choices, please take a step forward. Far too often, he has looked like what Bill Parcells used to refer to as a JAG: Just another guy. Maybe he can show up against the Spurs. Maybe they all can on Sunday the way they did in Las Vegas.
Maybe Mike Brown’s Knicks can finish the regular season stronger than Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks did, then get on the kind of heater Thibodeau’s Knicks did in the playoffs, really until they never recovered from Tyrese Haliburton’s shot coming down out of the Garden ceiling in Game 1 of the conference finals before dropping through the basket. But guess what?
The Pacers had been a better team than the Knicks since Jan. 1 of last season. The Pistons have been a better team in the conference since Day 1 of this whole season, Dolan’s championship-or-bust season for the Knicks.
Anunoby was asked to explain the Knicks beatdown of the Bucks on Friday night after the game:
“Probably just ball movement and then shoot with confidence. … That’s how it goes, just taking the right shots [and] moving the ball.”
The ball movement, as Knicks fans know better than anyone, has been a parttime job for Brown’s Knicks, despite all the bright talk on his way in the door about a system that sounded as if it were going to produce ball movement as dazzling as we used to get from Clyde and Capt. Willis and them. And, who knows, maybe it’s all about to kick into gear the rest of the way. If it doesn’t? You know how this will go, and is already going. Everybody will be asked to once again buy into the long-running obsession in Basketball New York about the man treated like the latest in a long line of basketball messiahs in the city: Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Giannis, of course, is the guy the Bucks can’t keep on the court, will be 32 at the end of this year and, despite the title on his resume, plays for a Bucks team that hasn’t made it out of the first round of the playoffs in four seasons.
Please understand: This season wasn’t supposed to end for the Knicks, at least not in the eyes of the men in charge, with Giannis being the prize. The Larry O’Brien Trophy was supposed to be the prize. We’re going to see about that between now and June, aren’t we?
A STORM OF MISSED SHOTS, THE WISDOM OF KNIGHT & KENNY IS A BIG-GAME BROADCASTER …
Looie Carnesecca always used to regale us, after a particularly bad shooting night for one of his teams, about what he called “Joe Lapchick’s nightmare.”
Joe’s nightmare was simple enough:
His players couldn’t make a single basket.
Not a single one.
Well, Rick Pitino is the St. John’s coach who lived out Joe’s nightmare in Hartford against UConn the other night.
Twenty-four missed shots in a row.
I know it’s not a record.
But it sure looked like one to fans of the Red Storm.
The Olympic men’s hockey players in attendance for the State of the Union address must have realized at some point in the proceedings that the speech was taking as long as the gold medal game against Canada.
By the way, the wisdom on the controversy over what the president said to the men’s team about the women’s team in the boozy frat house setting of the locker room came from Hilary Knight, who scored the tying goal against Canada in her own gold medal game:
“I think the guys were in a tough spot, so I think it’s a shame this storyline and narrative has kind of blown up and overshadowing that connection and genuine interest in one another and cheering each other on.”
Here’s a good question:
What offended you more about the scene in the locker room — what the president said or the sight of the fanboy head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation chugging beer and acting like the team mascot?
And guess what?
None of it could ruin the game we’d all just watched.
Was it a miracle, the way Lake Placid was a miracle?
Of course not.
Will there be a documentary about it 46 years from now?
You know the answer to that.
But it was still the best moment in Olympic men’s hockey since Lake Placid, and will have to do until a better one comes along.
If there is any good news associated with Giancarlo Stanton revelation about his sore elbow this week, it was this:
It’s going to get Aaron Judge more time at DH.
For the Yankees, that’s a good thing.
Just reading between the lines of the coverage last week, Gerrit Cole’s brief session against Judge and Trent Grisham and Jasson Dominguez was the best 18 pitches, like, ever.
When we look back on that Wild Card series between the Yankees and the Red Sox last October, it’s fair to wonder how everything would have played out if Cole had gotten a start.
But the Red Sox still have a right to wonder how things would have played out of Roman Anthony, their best player, hadn’t missed the whole thing because of an oblique injury.
Incidentally, I’ll ask this question again for all baseball fans:
When was the first time you remember “oblique” even becoming a thing?
No one would compare the World Baseball Classic to the Olympics.
It’s still worth remembering the ending we got in the last one, Shohei Ohtani striking out Mike Trout to end it.
Which, you have to say, wasn’t bad.
Here’s something that will be fascinating with the ’26 Mets, simply because Pete Alonso’s defense obviously was keeping David Stearns up nights:
How all that run prevention Stearns talks about is going to work out at first this season with Jorge Polanco and perhaps Mark Vientos both playing out of position there.
I cheered along with everybody else that Lindsey Vonn elected to chase her dream — at 41 — down the mountain one last time.
It was terrible to watch her crashing out the way she did, and then learning about everything she’s experienced since as doctors have surgically repaired another of her legs.
But I read somewhere that she won the Olympics, basically by just by showing up.
No, she did not.
Not if you watched everything that happened in the second week with the men’s hockey team and the women’s hockey team and with the gold medal Alysa Liu won in women’s figure skating, and even the one the great Mikaela Shiffrin one in the individual slalom final.
One more thing about the Milano Cortina Winter Games:
From the start, Kenny Albert was a total star with his hockey play-by-play, all the way to Jack Hughes.
Good guy, Kenny Albert.
Really good guy.
Even better big-game broadcaster.
His old man should be proud.
Aaron Rodgers … he’s not doing the darkness thing again, right?
