Let’s be honest: It would feel better to be able to scorch the Knicks after a game like this one, after a result like this one, this 130-111 loss to the Bucks in which they led for exactly 13 seconds all afternoon.
It was a thorough and convincing thumping. It was the kind of stomping that’s supposed to fill 19,812 spectators with fury as they leave Madison Square Garden.
But it was hard to detect much fury. In fact, at buzzer’s end there was actually … a polite round of applause. Applause! And the ones clapping their hands weren’t all wearing Giannis Antetokounmpo jerseys, either.
Even the innocent groans that accompanied so much of the proceedings Saturday afternoon had a clear tint to them.
“We could get mad. But what’s the point? Pass the egg nog!”
At this point, we know three things about the Knicks.
- If you are a bad team, they will take care of their business against you.
- If you are a good team, even a very good team, there’s a good chance they’ll find a way to grind their way past you. They’ve beaten the Clippers and the Suns. They’ve beaten the Cavaliers and the Heat. They’ve beaten the Lakers. Against all but the very elite, the Knicks will carry a 16-5 record into Christmas Day.
- But if you are one of the NBA’s very elite …
Well. That’s been a different story. After Saturday the Knicks are now 0-7 against the Bucks, the Celtics and the Timberwolves, who are three of the six odds-on favorites to make it to the NBA Finals. They’ve yet to play the 76ers (they get four of those after Jan. 1) or the Thunder or the Nuggets.
This is not a surprise, in any way, by any measure. We have known from Day 1 who the Knicks are, and in what strata they reside. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that a ceiling exists on a season. It’s something else to be reminded, time after time, that the ceiling is built out of concrete and steel, and not glass.
“We played out of a hole from the start of the game,” coach Tom Thibodeau said. “And it snowballed from there.”
“They’re a great team,” he added a bit later. “They’re rolling right now.”
The Bucks are that good. So are the Celtics. So are the Timberwolves, who will pay a visit to the Garden on New Year’s Day, and the Sixers, who are on the docket for the first time four days later in Philly.
Even before Mitch Robinson was lost for the season, the Bucks were a tough matchup for the Knicks. Without him, Antetokounmpo, Brook Lopez and old friend Bobby Portis Jr. look like starving men at a buffet table.
Add the fact that the Bucks also shot 50 percent from 3?
Games like that, against teams like this, it forces the Knicks to be perfect. They weren’t perfect Saturday. Only Jalen Brunson seemed the equal of any of the Bucks’ top seven or eight — 36 points (all in the first three quarters) and seven assists, and (undoubtedly) warm holiday greetings sent out to Becky Hammon.
Oh, and it gets better:
The Bucks will be waiting for them at straight-up noon Christmas Day. Perfect. Feliz Navidad.
“They’ve got a lot of weapons so you’ve got to fly around, and there were times where we did it and times we didn’t do as well as we should have,” Thibodeau said. “Every aspect of the game we were a step behind, a low-energy type game. We’ve got to bounce back, we didn’t move without the ball, didn’t run the floor like we usually do. We need those hustle points.”
This doesn’t take away all the good the Knicks have done this year, and they have done plenty. They haven’t yet had a slip against a bad team, an issue in each of the past three years. They grind. They battle. They win a lot of the 50-50 games. That’s not nothing.
But it seems like every time they get a little bit of the feel-good machine cooking, it feels like they run into one of the varsity teams. It means they can still very much get to where they felt like they could get at the beginning of the year — which was the same as where they got last year, the 4-5 series. Win that, the narrative has always been, you take a puncher’s shot against the Bucks or the Celtics or the Sixers.
It’s increasingly becoming fair to wonder what their best punch might be?
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