Knicks having hard time finding positives
Derrick Rose was seeking a light at the end of the tunnel, finding something to cling to after the Knicks lost another game Saturday night to fall to 3-6 on the season. So he thought back to his days with the Chicago Bulls when the team was a perennial contender.
"I think the year that we had the 62-game winning season we started off kind of bad and we picked things up along the way," Rose said of the 2010-11 Bulls.
"I’ve been on teams where we started off poorly and we found a way."
That Bulls team was 6-3, not 3-6, at the start, but they did win just nine of their first 17 games, struggling along at a middling pace nearly a quarter of the way through the season before reeling off seven consecutive wins and going on to a berth in the Eastern Conference Finals.
A sluggish start to the season hardly was unexpected for this Knicks team, putting together a group that has 10 new players, five who never had played an NBA game, and putting them in the charge of a new coach, who is running a system he’s never run before.
So the bright spots that Rose seeks are difficult to find. The Knicks may need a winning streak like that Bulls team had, but this team hasn’t won two straight games. The Knicks have surrendered at least 114 points in five of the nine games — and the only time that they held an opponent less than 100 came against a depleted Nets team playing on the second night of a back-to-back set.
How do you win when you’re playing like that?
"It shows," Rose said. "We haven’t been winning when we give up that many points and we give up that many points at the free-throw line. It’s about learning and [playing] a way that when they’re close to the bonus, communicating to each other, letting each other know that we can’t get any stupid fouls.
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"I mean it’s going to take time but we got to have it where when is enough enough. We have got to have that type of mentality. We got to continue to play, continue to go hard and continue to improve every day."
"There are some things we’re doing extremely well, we’re getting better at," Carmelo Anthony said. "I don’t want to make it seem like we’re not making strides and getting better. We are definitely getting better. We’ve got to put a whole game together now. We’re still doing it in spurts. When we play well we play extremely well. And when we’re not we don’t play well at all."
The Knicks couldn’t keep up with even a short-handed Celtics squad Friday and then were outclassed by the Raptors on Saturday. The schedule gets a little easier now with Dallas — banged up and with a worse record than the Knicks — at Madison Square Garden tonight and after hosting Detroit on Wednesday they travel to Washington to face the struggling Wizards.
So could this be a point where they begin to get themselves on track?
They already switched up the coaching roles with Kurt Rambis heading up the defense now — and the 115 and 118 points allowed in the past two games hardly is a resounding bit of evidence that it has gotten better.
"It’s on us to really figure this thing out," Kristaps Porzingis said.
"It’s not the best thing to change a defense already in the season, so it’s kind of hard. But every game it’s going to get better. That’s got to be our mind-set. We can not worry about how we’re playing right now. We’ve just got to step by step, day by day, we’re going to get better, and we’ll be the team that everybody expects us to be."
BRIEF: Brandon Jennings has been fined $15,000 for directing inappropriate language toward a game official and failing to leave the court in a timely manner following his ejection in the fourth quarter of Friday’s 115-87 loss at Boston.
Email: popper@northjersey.com
