Knicks second unit group shot black uniform
Thursday night offered the Knicks an opportunity to get back on track. After dropping back-to-back games against the Charlotte Hornets and Minnesota Timberwolves, the Knicks welcomed the 16-28 New Orleans Pelicans to The Garden.
But bad turned to worse on Thursday, as the Knicks had a putrid night all around, falling the Pelicans, 102-91.
“When things aren’t going your way, it’s easy to get sidetracked, it’s easy to get distracted in this league,” head coach Tom Thibodeau said afterwards. “That’s what we can’t do. We can’t place blame. We’ve got to work our way out of this, work our way out together.”
As a team, the Knicks shot just 37.7 percent overall from the floor, including just 23.7 percent (9-of-38) from three-point range. One of the most glaring stat sheet lines belonged to Julius Randle, who was a team worst -26, scoring four points on 1-of-9 shooting, though he did add six assists and seven rebounds.
Randle didn’t speak to the media after the game, but Thibodeau pointed to the team’s performance as a whole rather than any individual player.
“When things aren’t going our way, Julius is going to take a lot of blame. He gets a lot of credit, but that goes with the turf, but it’s a team game and we didn’t get into it with any one individual,” Thibodeau said. “Like I said, we have to get out of it as a team. I don’t think it was any one particular play or one incident, things just weren’t going our way, and we’ve got to understand that’s part of it.”
With Thursday’s loss, the Knicks have now dropped three in a row, which come immediately on the heels of a three-game winning streak. The Knicks are 11th in the Eastern Conference standings, but with things so jammed up in the East, they’re only 1.5 games out of the eighth seed.
So while the Knicks are certainly in the midst of a rough patch, there’s plenty of time to make up ground.
“No one likes to lose, but at the same time, what can you do? It already happened. We can’t dwell on it,” said RJ Barrett. “Just got to watch the film and just go and fix it and not let it continue.”
“It’s a part of the process,” said veteran Taj Gibson, “but the main thing is I’m happy I see guys pissed off about it, rather than just joking about it, laughing about it. We’ve got some serious guys in the locker room that really want to do well.
“Nights like this hurt, and you can point fingers, you can be pissed, but the next day you’ve just got to get up, get back ready and try to shore up the mistakes you made the last game and try to come back even harder for the next game.”
