Every once in a while it’s lovely to play a game like this, to welcome a team like these Sacramento Kings into your house, because in many ways they are like the perfect Homecoming Game enemy. They are fun to watch, with a lot of dazzling, filling young stars.
And they cannot guard a stop sign.
Here’s how a team that will never be confused with Paul Westhead’s longtime Loyola Marymount teams can score 140 points in a single basketball game, as the Knicks did for a satisfied gathering of just under 2,000 fans at Madison Square Garden Thursday night.
There were times when Tom Thibodeau, the defensive whispering coach, looked like he was going to be blacked out if he surrendered to the Knicks 121, but only coaches really love these kinds of games. As long as the home team ends on the left of the hyphen, the customers will be satisfied. And the Knicks have crawled within one game of .500 for the third time in the past 10 days.
“We’re coming,” said Thibodeau.
At 16-17, the Knicks are also slowly toward the middle of the season, three games shy of 36, so we’ve officially reached the point where, with data and information and 33 pieces of testimony, we can wonder exactly what our recalibrated standard is. should be for this season.
Is it still okay to focus solely on the process?
Now is it OK to focus on the possibility of the playoffs?
“I would say equally important,” Thibodeau had said about 90 minutes before the game. ‘I don’t want us to get lost and get too far ahead. I just want us to focus on what’s ahead. I think you start the season with [playoffs] in thoughts and all the things you have to do.
“You want to consistently build those habits. Good practice is important, knowing your opponent well. If you start taking that away and start looking too far down the road, you’re going to get cut and fall. “
Fair enough. Still, the wins have made it much more of a habit of winning than anyone realistically thought in Thibodeau’s first year. Remember, they got an Over / Under number of 22.5 wins by virtual Vegas consensus. They are way ahead of that pace. They are, in fact, squarely in the middle of an Eastern Conference that appears to be divided into three different hives at this point:
The clear elite: the Sixers, the Nets and (despite some sloppy play recently) the Bucks.
Teams that have shuffled but insist on logic and common sense will straighten themselves out and make a comfortable push to the top five: the Celtics and the Heat.
The fight for slots 6 to 10.
And that’s where this Knicks season gets very intriguing, as they wake up Friday morning with the Raptors for fifth place, embroiled in what will almost certainly be a seven-team rock fight for the final five playoff spots in the East. Right now, the Knicks, Pacers, Raptors, Bulls, Hornets, Hawks, and Magic are all within three losses of each other in the standings. Five of those seven are coming in (assuming you don’t believe the recent turnaround in Washington is permanent; if you do, it’s five out of eight).
All those teams have flaws and flaws, just like the Knicks. Neither of these teams have a reasonable chance of making any noise in the playoffs assuming things fall into place as they likely will in the second half. And so they will all wonder the same thing:
Process about playoffs?
Playoffs past trial?
Both?
Both are ideal. But is both realistic?
“Just think of what goes into winning and building the right habits every day,” said Thibodeau before the match.
“We’ll get there,” he said twice afterwards.
Where in the end? Saturday, the Pacers come to the yard, and suddenly enough intriguing things are going on. Another crack on .500. A chance to beat a team in that overcrowded pile of pretenders and contenders waiting to be sifted to one side or the other in the coming months.
And of course: working on the process, so keeping an eye on the price, and not being too far ahead. Still having thoughts on the playoffs that only exist in fever beats beats. Maybe they can co-exist after all.