There was a little something for everyone Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, plenty of nausea and queasiness to go around. There was Tom Thibodeau, who spent most of the night looking like someone who’d eaten a bad batch of chicken wings for dinner.
There was Leon Rose, who had to have noticed that for the second straight game a player the Knicks were linked to this summer lit his team aflame. Sunday night in Cleveland it was Donovan Mitchell and his 38 points and 12 assists. Wednesday it was Dejounte Murray and his 36 points and nine assists and six steals.
And, of course, there were the 19,812 people inside the Garden, who spent the game’s first 15 or so minutes making the old gym sound like a bachelor party at McSorley’s, then spent the final 33 minutes wondering if the Knicks would have been able to give an NAIA team a solid run.
It was that bad. It was that brutal. It was a 112-99 loss to the Hawks, which has become one of the more galling parts of this Knicks era, Trae Young and friends walking into the Garden and ransacking the place the way Led Zeppelin used to wreck hotels, doing whatever they want, scoring at will, blowing the doors off the home team.
“We’ve got to do better,” Thibodeau groused.
Seven games into the season, the Knicks are already a team in crisis. This looked, in so many troubling ways, like so many games out of last year. They seized a 23-point lead in the second quarter, and then were outscored by 42 — by 42! — across the next 25 minutes. The crowd implored them for a while but even the faithful lost faith after seeing so much carnage.
“It was compounded,” Thibodeau said. “If you’re missing shots, they’re pushing the ball up the floor, giving them easy buckets the other way. They’re going to make up ground quickly. And they did.”
The Knicks were porous on defense, ponderous on offense, poor in transition, patsies off the glass (17 offensive rebounds for Atlanta) and none of those things was the worst part of the night. This was the worst part of the night:
Right now, the Knicks have a glass jaw.
You put them on the canvas, they don’t get back up again, and barely reach for the ropes. That’s how a nine-point fourth-quarter lead became a 13-point loss Sunday night in Cleveland. That’s how 23-up became 19-down, settling on another 13-point loss Wednesday at MSG. That won’t do.
That won’t do it all.
And none of the players the Knicks are going to lean heavily on — Julius Randle, Jalen Brunson, RJ Barrett — were able to do anything about it, even though Young missed a large portion of the second half after getting poked in the eye and started the game missing 10 of his first 12 shots. Murray was more than enough, helping to erase much of the 23-point spread by himself on both ends of the floor.
(If you happen to be a fan of the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross,” maybe you could at least enjoy the fact that the Knicks’ two failed offseason pursuits were Mitch and Murray. And maybe you smiled and yelled at your TV screen as a surrogate for Rose: “Put that coffee down. Coffee is for closers only.”)
But that was the only smile available. This was no laughing matter. This is no laughing matter. As feel-good as the Knicks 3-1 start was, there was a genuine understanding that those wins had come against some seriously undermanned opponents. The varsity arrived with a sobering loss in Milwaukee, backed up by the Cleveland flop.
Now it’s three in a row, and the schedule doesn’t ease up for another week, and there needs to be a profound change in how they’re doing things because we have seen before how 3-4 can become 3-8 in the blink of an eye. And don’t think the rest of the league didn’t notice how the Knicks evaporated once the Hawks threw a zone at them.
“All we can do is learn from it,” Obi Toppin said, “and get better.”
The games come at you fast: Philly, Boston, Minnesota, Brooklyn. The Knicks are in crisis but not yet calamity — basketball calamity in New York, for now anyway, is strictly the purview of Brooklyn. But the Knicks know, same as the coach knows, that nobody wants to hear excuses. There is only one solution for this, and Thibodeau called it.
They’ve got to do better.
