KNICKS STILL ROAD TRIPPIN’
Stall late PISTOnS 104 knIckS 101
DETROIT – The Knicks at least will be home for the holidays, another advantage from what has been a fortuitous schedule throughout the first half of the season.
But their chilly road woes still aren’t showing enough signs of stopping, either, playing a tight game but falling to 2-10 away from Madison Square Garden with a frustrating 104-101 loss to the Pistons on Friday night in their initial visit to first-year Little Caesars Arena. Following their home matinee against Philadelphia on Christmas, the Knicks will play 16 of their next 20 on the road, a string that likely will better determine their positioning for a potential playoff run.
“It’s tough. I can’t say it enough,” Enes Kanter said. “For the last whatever minutes, we just need to know how to finish the games. Especially the fourth quarters are really important for us.
“If we’re talking about playoffs, we need to figure it out. It’s too important, man. If a team doesn’t know how to win on the road, then even if we make the playoffs, we’re not gonna go that far.”
Kristaps Porzingis led the Knicks (1715) with 29 points on 12-for-28 shooting, including 10 in the fourth quarter, a marked improvement on his one-point outing (0-for-11) during the previous night’s home win over Boston.
Kanter chipped in 22 points and 16 rebounds and Courtney Lee added 16 for the Knicks, while Tobias Harris scored 24 and Andre Drummond had 18 with 15 boards for Detroit (18-14).
“We just didn’t execute the plays (at the end). We rushed some things. We just didn’t execute, didn’t run the plays the right way,” Porzingis said. “There’s nothing — we have to run the plays the right way, everybody, including myself. That’s it. Simple.”
The Knicks surprisingly defeated Cleveland on the road in October, and they won a semi-road game in Brooklyn earlier this month, but they otherwise haven’t posted victories in any of their other first dozen tries outside Manhattan, where they are an impressive 15-5 for the season.
“Well, they’ve played 20 (games) at home and 11 on the road, so a cynical person, which I’m not, would say that the league tried to help them build some confidence early in the year by giving them a lot of home games and giving them a chance to get going and pick up some confidence,” Pistons coach Stan Van Gundy said before the game. “That’s what a cynical person would say, not me. Not me. It’s just chance that they got that many home games early on.”
The Knicks clawed back from an early 13-point deficit and were tied early in the fourth quarter, before a couple of Ish Smith drives pushed the Pistons ahead, 93-85, midway through the period.
Porzingis netted 10 points during a 16-4 surge that left the Knicks up by six with 1:17 remaining. But Detroit scored the next five points, including a runner and a free throw by Reggie Jackson (10 points) for a 102-101 lead with 23 seconds to go.
“I think we did a lot of things right,” Porzingis said. “We were down. We fought back. It’s hard to do on the road.
“We can look in the mirror and say to each other, those little details that we could have done better, that would have changed the game. At the end in games like this it’s all going to be about the little things at the end — execution, the right pass, the right shot. All those things. That’s where, in these close games, that’s where the win or loss is.”
This loss was cemented on the Knicks’ final two possessions. Reggie Bullock rejected Lee’s ensuing drive, Stanley Johnson dropped in two free throws and Porzingis’ last-second heave — after he collected an errant pass from Lee — didn’t even hit the rim at the final horn.
“Yeah, it’s definitely frustrating,” Lee said. “We’re up at the end of the game and a couple of mistakes where, those last final possessions, we messed up two plays out there and rushed one play. So it was definitely self-inflicted. It was definitely frustrating. You can keep saying it, but it’s true. You definitely have to learn from it.”