Tough to Spur Woody’s team
THE KNICKS can’t even win games now against teams that are trying to lose. It’s almost comical, but Mike Woodson’s team sank to a new low on Wednesday night by being outhustled and outperformed by the Sixers, a team in full-blown tanking mode, in a 110-106 defeat.
This was billed as “Garden of Dreams Night” and it certainly didn’t work out the way Jim Dolan had planned. Absent again from another horrible defensive effort that featured yet another critical lapse, the Garden chairman missed the game’s end, when the fans who cared to stick around showered his team with some of the loudest boos of the season.
The Knicks already had a locker room with problems. Team chemistry is an issue, with Tyson Chandler, a respected voice in the locker room, sniping at Woodson over defensive strategy in the Nets loss. Woodson has spent two days defending his coaching, something he hardly ever had to do a season ago.
This is the kind of loss that won’t help the cause, as Carmelo Anthony admitted when the Knicks lost their fifth straight game and fell to 0-3 on this crucial eightgame home stand.
“When you lose, it brings everything down,” he said. “Any negativity, any confusion can really sink into the locker room. Right now, I don’t see that. Guys are upset we’re losing. It’s unacceptable.”
If only the Knicks played with that attitude. But they seem to be resigned to having themselves one awful season. Yet again, they failed to execute the defensive game plan in a big moment. Trailing by two with 1:47 to go, they allowed Thaddeus Young an uncontested threepointer that came during the Sixers’ 16-5 game-ending run.
“We knew the play was coming,” Chandler said. “He got an open look.”
Thanks to the Knicks, this was a night when the Sixers couldn’t help but divert from their master plan of “losing with a purpose.” They’re trying to collect the most Ping-Pong balls they can, with some big-time players at Kansas, Duke, Oklahoma State and Kentucky whiling away their one year of college basketball until the draft arrives five months from now.
Counting the Sixers, the Knicks were starting a stretch of five straight home games against teams with a combined 76-134 record (36%). In this dreadful group, only Charlotte, at present, is holding onto a playoff spot, while owning a 19-25 record after Wednesday’s victory over the Clippers. But that’s still good enough for eighth place in the East.
“It’s the East, it’s the East,” Jason Kidd was saying the other day. “The last playoff spot might still be up for grabs in April.”
Woodson would sign up for that now, although that would mean a first-round matchup probably against Indiana and a quick end to the Knicks’ season. And it probably would also mean the end of his coaching career in New York.
Like a lot of other teams, the coach has manpower problems, we all know. The roster is flawed — that’s been apparent from the season opener. The only player who has performed up to snuff is Anthony, and it’s looking as if he’ll make tracks at season’s end for Los Angeles. Everybody else has regressed or is playing poorly, Chandler included.
But there is a lot more wrong with this team that goes right to the heart of the issue of the make-up of the roster and the lack of chemistry. Compared to last season, there is none.
The 54-win season and playoff series victory against Boston looked like the start of something here that hasn’t been seen since the 1990s. But the recent sniping over Woodson’s coaching is just the latest sign that the Knicks are again spinning their wheels when it comes to establishing a winning culture.
The Sixers brought in rookie coach Brett Brown from San Antonio, where he was an assistant coach for a dozen years under Gregg Popovich. You want to talk about establishing a winning culture? Brown can speak to that all night, knowing the Spurs never have the kind of internal problems that we’ve seen in Woodson’s locker room.
“There is discipline, no question,” Brown said. “The Spurs have veteran players who lead. Any time you can coach your best players the way Pop does and they allow the coach to coach that way, then they understand the end game. That is, winning the championship and playing in May and June. The more they do it, the sell becomes easier. Then the culture is established. But it takes time. Everybody talks about establishing a culture, but it’s very hard to achieve.”
So you see a winning culture in San Antonio and Miami and anywhere else where they’ve crowned a champion.
Just never at the Garden.