It’s so wonderful every now and then to play such a game, to welcome a team like these Sacramento Kings into your home, because they are in many ways the perfect enemy for coming home. They are nice to look at, with lots of dazzling young stars.
And they can not guard a stop sign.
This is how a team that will never be confused for Paul Westhead’s old Loyola Marymount teams can score 140 points in a single basketball game, like the Knicks before a contented gathering of just under 2,000 fans Thursday night in Madison Square Garden did.
There were times that Tom Thibodeau, the coach of the defensive whisperer, seemed like he could hand over the Knicks 121, but only coaches really like such games. As long as the home team ends up on the left side of the hyphen, the customers will be happy. And the Knicks have crawled for the third time in the last ten days in one .500 game.
“We’re getting there,” Thibodeau said.
At 16-17, the Knicks are also slowly reaching the season’s halfway mark, three games are only 36, so we have officially reached the point where we can wonder with data and information and 33 testimonials what exactly our recalibrated standard is. because this season should be.
Is it still OK to focus exclusively on the process?
Is it OK now to focus on the possibility of the playoffs?
“I would say equally important,” Thibodeau said about 90 minutes before the game. “I do not want us to get lost and go too far. I just want us to concentrate on what lies ahead. I think you start the season with [playoffs] in mind and all the things you need to do.
‘You want to build these habits consistently. Practicing well is important to know your opponent well. If you start taking away from it and start looking too far down the road, then you are going to blink and fall. ”
Fair enough. Yet the victories made much more of the habit of winning than anyone in Thibodeau’s first year realistically thought. They are, remember, by a virtual Vegas consensus an Over / Under number of 22.5 wins. They are the pace far ahead. They are in fact square in the middle of an Oriental conference that currently looks like three different roles:
The clear elite: the Sixers, the Nets and (despite a meager game recently) the Bucks.
Teams that have struggled but logic and common sense insist on it will straighten themselves out and comfortably push the top five: the Celtics and the Heat.
The scramble for slots 6 to 10.
And this is where this Knicks season gets terribly intriguing, as they are nailed with the Raptors for fifth place on Friday morning, engaging in what will surely be a seven-team rock battle around the final five playoffs in the East. Right now, the Knicks, Pacers, Raptors, Bulls, Hornets, Hawks and Magic are all within three defeats of each other. Five of the seven will come in (if you assume you do not believe the recent turnaround in Washington is permanent; if you do, it’s five out of eight).
All of those teams have flaws and mistakes, just like the Knicks do. Neither team has a fair chance of making any noise in the play-offs, assuming things like in the second half are likely to fall into place. And everyone will ask themselves the same thing:
Process over playoffs?
Plays about process?
Both?
Both are ideal. But are both realistic?
“Just think about winning every day and building the right habits,” Thibodeau said before the game.
“We’ll get there,” he would say twice afterwards.
Where, finally? On Saturday, the Pacers come to the yard, and suddenly there are a lot of interesting things in play. Another crack at .500. A chance to beat a team in the overflowing hope and candidates waiting to be sifted to one side or the next few months.
And of course: work on the process, which means you have to keep an eye on the price, which means they do not go too far ahead of themselves. Still knocking to have thoughts about the playoffs that only exist in fever dreams. Maybe they can live together after all.