NO KRIS-MAS GIFT
Knicks cough up a 15-point
Porzingis continues rehab from knee surgery and won’t be evaluated again until February
It was a battle in the basement – the deep cellar – and the Knicks somehow hit a new rock bottom. After Friday night’s 114-107 loss to the lowly Atlanta Hawks, it’s easy to argue they’re the worst team in the NBA.
And maybe that’s a good thing for a franchise dreaming about Zion.
The Knicks (9-25), losers of four straight, have suffered defeats this season to the bottom of the barrel in the NBA — the Suns, the Hawks, the Cavs and the Bulls.
Friday was em- barrassing on multiple levels. They were leading by 15 in the first half; then, as one Hawks player put it in the locker room afterwards, “they couldn’t f--king score in the second half.”
Indeed, the Knicks went ice cold after the break, managing just 38 points between the third and fourth quarters.
“For whatever reason, we are hitting walls in that third quarter,” Knicks coach David Fizdale said. “That’s our new quarter, for some reason. We look fatigued, and we stop moving the ball. Everything that was sharp in the first half, kind of fades out in the second. We have to figure it out; I even
try to get into the rotation earlier in the third just to see if I can get some fresh legs going.”
The Knicks, losers of nine of their last 10, own the fifthworst record in the NBA but are just a ½ game ahead of the Cavs for the very worst. It’s a close race at the bottom.
Against the Hawks (8-23), Emmanuel Mudiay remained a positive presence with 32 points in 34 minutes but the rest of the roster was an inefficient mess. Tim Hardaway Jr., who is dealing with his plantar fasciitis injury, had 15 points in 38 minutes and the Knicks were outscored by 13 when he was on the floor.
“You can’t do anything but come back the next day and work,” he said. “And look at our mistakes but there are so many times we can say that. We’re 30-plus games in and we have to hold ourselves accountable. They scored 60 points in the first half so they still had a great offensive half going into halftime. We have to get better on that end of the floor. We’re scoring, we just got to put a string of stops together in order for us to get wins.”
The Knicks, heading into Friday, owned the secondworst defensive rating in the NBA, just ahead of the Cavs. The idea of a gritty, lunch-pail squad developing under Fizdale has not materialized.
Instead, they have one of the worst, if not the worst, teams in the NBA. Buckle up.