The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Knox, Fizdale dismiss idea of team ‘tanking’
CLEVELAND — The Knicks were loose Monday morning as they prepared for their game against the Cavaliers hours later. The front-office executives were all here, scattered around the seats just off the court and when the work was done players trash-talked their way through one-onone competitions and Mario Hezonja was showing off his soccer skills, kicking a ball into the upper deck of Quicken Loans Arena.
If you didn’t know better you might not know that the Knicks were facing a humbling bit of history — facing the Cavs in a battle to see who would be the worst team in the NBA and also the possibility of a 17-game losing streak, which would be the worst single-season stretch in franchise history.
But they know. And if the plan set in place was bound for this outcome, they want you to know that they — the players and coaches — are not tanking. If the losses come steadily, they still are enduring it with a hope of better days coming from it.
“Yeah, a lot of fans, they always say some dumb stuff,” Knicks rookie Kevin Knox said. “You see it all the time with the tanking and want us to lose, stuff like that. It’s kind of stupid. They’re not really true New Yorkers. Real Knicks fans know that we’re trying to just take this year to kind of just develop us young guys and then next year hopefully make a push.
“Every night we’re just going to go out and just play hard. We’re going to compete at the highest level. We might make some mistakes towards the end of the game, which costs us the loss. For us, just go out there and just compete. We’re in a lot of close games with a lot of great teams, playoff teams. That just shows you how close we are from winning those games. We’re just missing a couple of pieces. It’s really good for us young guys to go out there and play against some of those playoff teams and be able to be in games. We lose to the Raptors by five, it’s a playoff team. It’s good to see us — we’re getting better every single game.”
It is that hope that they cling to, that keeps them going when none of them have ever gone through anything like this. The Knicks knew this would be a difficult season when it began with Kristaps Porzingis expected to miss most or all of the season, and even that distant hope that he would be back to change things abruptly ended when he was traded ahead of the trade deadline on Jan. 31.
The Knicks sat veterans much of the season, and depending on your perspective, it was either to allow the young players to develop or to continue the chase to the bottom of the standings and a shot at the top pick in the NBA draft.
“I think there’s actually been teams that have come into games trying to lose a game,” Knicks coach David Fizdale said. “That’s just not in our vocabulary. Do we play well every night? Do we do enough to win the game every night? Maybe not. But at the end of the day I know these guys are coming out to compete to win.
“(When people say tanking), I don’t read it and listen to it, so I don’t get caught up in it. I just think there’s a difference between losing games and trying to lose games.”