Monday represents an unwanted milestone for the Knicks.
It marks one month since they beat a team above .500. Their last such win came against the Nuggets in Denver on March 6. Since then? They’ve gone 0-5 against teams with winning records. All of those games were on the road against the Lakers, Clippers, Hornets, Thunder and Rockets.
Monday starts a final four-game stretch against teams above .500 to close the regular season, beginning in Atlanta against the Hawks, followed by home games against the Celtics, Raptors and Hornets.
“For us, I think it’s just making sure we’re locked in and focused,” Josh Hart said after practice Sunday. “Obviously this is a good little stretch to end the season to make sure we’re as sharp as we can be going into the playoffs. The past is the past, nothing you can do about it now. Our focus is on tomorrow being 1-0 against playoff teams, and then we move on to the next one, and then we want to be 1-0, and then we want to move onto the next one and be 1-0. Nothing in the past really matters. It’s about what we do moving forward that we’ll be judged on and what we judge ourselves on.”
Those five losses are sandwiched between seven- and two-game winning streaks against teams well below .500 and, for the most part, tanking. And they are part of a growing concern that the Knicks have struggled against higher quality opposition for a while now.
The NBA, this year more than ever, has clear haves and have-nots in team quality. A few wins or blowouts over bottom-feeders composed of youngsters or G-Leaguers don’t quell the alarm bells regarding how the Knicks fare in real tests.
And it’s not just the results that are troubling, it’s how the Knicks lose. Their offense becomes more stagnant and Jalen Brunson-heavy. There are particularly bad starts to games, which they might be able to overcome against lowly teams but find much harder to overcome against quality teams. Their transition defense is shoddy, betraying so much of their improvement on that side of the ball in the second half of the year.
“You gotta give Charlotte, Oklahoma City and Houston credit, they played well,” coach Mike Brown said. “I said it postgame, we did not play well in some areas. … We didn’t play well in those three games and we deserved to lose, as much as you hate to say it. And hopefully we’ll play better going forward because we’ve got a couple of teams above .500, so we’ll see.”
Beyond simply being above .500, all four of the Knicks’ remaining opponents will be Eastern Conference playoff or play-in teams. One thing Brown acknowledged is that they don’t want to show these potential playoff opponents everything and that they want to keep a few looks in their back pocket to unleash during the postseason.
It creates a weird dynamic this final week.
“It’s a challenging stretch that not a lot of people talk about,” Landry Shamet said Sunday. “This last stretch of the season, these last few games, you’re kind of gearing up for the playoffs, you know what you’re building for, but you gotta be here and locked in each night, each team, each challenge in front of you. I think it’s more about approaching each game with the right mentality. Make it more about us than who we’re playing. We’re working on something bigger and building for something bigger, keeping that top of mind while still taking each game seriously and approaching them as you should.”
Last year, the Knicks’ struggles against top opposition in the regular season — particularly with the Celtics — didn’t really translate to the postseason. But they should not just be ignored or considered meaningless.
Just relying on everything changing once the playoffs start is a risky mindset.
“It’s not something you can just flip a switch in the playoffs and say, ‘OK the playoffs are here, let’s go out there and do our thing,’ ” Hart said. “We gotta make sure that we take these next four games as serious as we can, make sure we lock in mentally and physically to what the game plan is and to what this team wants to do moving forward and execute.”
Four more games means four final chances for the Knicks to quiet a worrying narrative that has recently begun hovering over them.
