The Knicks get a game on Friday night against the Thunder, a big-game Friday night at Madison Square Garden, that not only gives them a chance for some payback after what happened in Oklahoma City last week, but also gives us another opportunity for them to show us that even with Karl-Anthony Towns in town, that this season is going to be better than last season. Because we sure don’t know that yet.
The Knicks get the Thunder, one of the two best teams in the league along with the Cavaliers, and then on Sunday they get a Bucks team that has been 17-8 since starting out 2-8. So the Knicks see, and at home, how they measure up, at least for now, against Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his guys at home, and then Giannis Antetokounmpo and his guys.
Always across the long season, there are loud regular season moments that have a postseason feel. The Knicks get two of them, right here and right now, back-to-back.
Good time for these games to come along, for sure. But still: How good are these Knicks, really?
They absolutely had the 9-game winning streak that ended in Oklahoma City. But that streak included two wins over the Wizards, currently 6-29. One over the Jazz, who are 9-26. One over the 8-29 Raptors and another over the 7-31 Pelicans. The other three wins came against the 22-16 Magic, and the 19-17 Timberwolves, the night Towns put it on his old team.
The reality of this, as always, is that you play who you play, and certainly don’t throw back any wins when you’re trying to retain at least some kind of contact with the Cavs, and with the Celtics. But another reality of the Knicks season is this:
Around that winning streak, so much of it against the dregs of the league, they are a .500 team.
They are also closer in the standings to the 9th place Pistons, who come into the Garden next week, than they are to the first-place Cavaliers. And they face the same questions about depth that they faced last season, and that means before everybody started getting hurt. And make it hard to remember very many games this season when you came away from a Knicks victory thinking how important the guys off the bench were, and that means even when Deuce McBride has been healthy.
Here’s what Leon Rose, who has been a star since taking over the Knicks, said after bringing a star like Towns to the team:
“Karl-Anthony brings a skillset that is unique to the game of basketball. He possesses a blend of playmaking, shooting, rebounding and defending that in combination with his size allows him to compete at a level that is rare in this league.”
Leon may have gotten a little carried away with the part about the unique skill set in a sport that still has LeBron in it, but you get the idea. Rose was taking a big swing here, not for next season, or the one after that. Since the start of the 2023-24 season, though, he’s been swinging away, adding OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges and Towns, and you see where the Knicks are, sitting in third place in the conference, with only the Cavs and the defending champs ahead of them, even if the Cavs are ahead by a lot.
But a lot of Rose’s draft capital is gone and, if he still thinks this edition of the Knicks needs more, it’s going to be a lot more difficult to make it better at the trade deadline, one year after he swung the trade for Anunoby. Not because Rose doesn’t have his own skill set as an executive, just because he is in a bit of a box.
Without going all inside baseball here, or basketball, the Knicks are currently in the second tier above the luxury tax line, known as the second apron. And landing there comes with a laundry list of penalties and restrictions on spending. Teams in this tier cannot take on more salary than they send out in a trade (teams under the luxury tax line can take back up to 125% of outgoing salary); cannot make use of trade exceptions or bundle multiple players’ salaries in a trade; cannot sign players who have been bought out of their contracts.
Those are some of the tools traditionally used by contending teams to shore up holes during long runs of success or to fabricate a coherent roster around multiple max-contract stars. But these days, the Knicks have access to none of them. Perhaps their most attractive — and expendable — trade chip would be Mitchell Robinson, but with his injury history, what are they going to get in return for Robinson at this point?
Listen: When the Knicks have played their best this season, whatever the opponent, they have shown you what an outstanding starting five they have, and an old-school ability to play from the inside out. Towns has the ability to score big, so does Jalen Brunson, and Bridges, and OG. Josh Hart has the ability, clearly, to go for a triple double on any given night. We see what they all can do, and we know how much of the load they’re already carrying for Tom Thibodeau, and how little help they get off the bench, especially when McBride is hurt.
The Knicks have a starting five more talented than the last one was, without question. They’re fun to watch, they’re a tough out, they even looked as if they might pass the Celtics not too very long ago. Right they’ve got 10 games until LeBron comes to town on Feb. 1, and as they go past the halfway point of the season: Thunder, Bucks, Pistons, 76ers, T’wolves, Hawks, Nets, Kings, Grizzlies, Nuggets. Be a good time for them to get hot again, starting on Friday night. Start showing us how much game they’ve really got.
