After moving on from a very disappointing and frustrating 2021-22 season, Knicks fans have been doing their best to be optimistic heading into this season. The team acquired a playmaker that fans could finally believe in. RJ Barrett, Obi Toppin and Immanuel Quickley all had great results the previous season. There was hope that Julius Randle would experience some form of positive regression and that Coach Thibodeau would have changed some things.
And it all looked pretty dandy and sweet to start the season. The team started the year with a tough loss to a strong Memphis team, but bounced back with three straight wins over Detroit, Orlando and Charlotte. Randle took a closer look at the All-NBA version of himself, Brunson looked like an All-Star, and Toppin looked like he couldn’t miss downtown. Sitting 3-1 with a team playing a faster, more selfless brand of basketball, there were some really good vibes around the fan base.
But that didn’t last very long. At all. The Knicks lost six of their next nine games. During that horrible streak, they lost to the Nets by 27 points and then gave up 145 points in regulation time to the Oklahoma City Thunder. They ended up going 3-2 on the West Coast trip, but honestly, it was just more than them battling bad teams. All three of their wins have come against a Jazz team that’s been doing pretty poorly lately, a Nuggets team without Nikola Jokic, and a Thunder team that’s not particularly good either. Through it all, between Julius Randle’s inconsistent performance, RJ Barrett’s awful cold streak, Obi Toppin’s negative shooting regression and the team’s mostly ugly defense outside of Cam Reddish and Quickey , there was a very real hunch and dread that this season would start to dip, much like it did around this time last year.
If you recall, the 2021-22 Knicks started the season 5-1, and the fans felt absolutely amazing. But then the leaks started showing up. They suffered nasty losses to the Pacers, Cavaliers and Hornets, and barely managed to string together enough wins against mediocre teams to make fans believe they were going to turn the tide. Yet they never did. They made a few alignment and rotation changes in an attempt to straighten the ship, and while this yielded positive results, it ultimately didn’t move the needle much. The rest of the season ended with an amalgam of blown runs, horrible practice decisions, Randle underperforming and mingling with the fans, and overall mediocrity. And for the most part, that has been the problem once again.
Since their 3-1 start, this side have been repeatedly embarrassed by their lack of defence, their confused distribution of minutes, an attacking game plan that lacks creativity or versatility, a complete inability to know the three and their reluctance to adapt.
To put it into context, the Knicks are currently 3-12 against unnamed teams the Hornets, Magic, Pistons, Thunder. They were just a mediocre team, good enough to beat really bad teams but not good enough to beat good teams. They play just well enough to keep fans hopeful, only to let them down in eerily similar ways just like last year.
And if you look elsewhere, it’s much more the same old, the same old. Thibodeau has been a point of contention for many fans. Randle, despite improving offensive stats, seems completely uninterested on defense for many games. Quickley and Toppin often find themselves playing less than 20 minutes. The team once again blew leads. And whenever adversity hits this team, it tends to shut down completely.
For the second year in a row, this is a team that’s built for the future, with a coach trying to win now, with a front office that’s not fully committed at either end of the spectrum. . And if Leon Rose doesn’t want to see his team die a slow and painful death like they did last season, then sooner or later changes will have to be made. Unfortunately, until then, it looks increasingly likely that this season will be just a one-way ticket to NBA purgatory – the gambling game, if we’re lucky – as the front office looks to hoard draft picks and waits for the next young star to become disgruntled.
