Surely it was a coincidence, because these things can’t get pulled together so quickly. But no sooner had De’Aaron Fox fed Richaun Holmes for an easy dunk, giving the Sacramento Kings — the 1-5 Sacramento Kings — a 72-44 lead over the Knicks three minutes into the second half, a couple of things happened.
First, up in the high corner seats behind the Knicks bench, near close enough to touch the Garden’s pinwheel roof, the first inevitable chants of the season tumbled from the lips of some especially angry faithful:
“FIRE FIZDALE!
“FIRE FIZFALE!!
“FIRE FIZDALE!!!”
At that exact moment, there was a timeout, and the lights suddenly went out, and there was a hopeful buzz making its way around the old gym (Can we go home now?!) and then, out of a fever dream dating to 1993 or so, out came … the Knicks City Dancers!
They did their thing.
Then the lights came back on.
And the Knicks went back to doing their thing.
“We had nothing,” said David Fizdale, Knicks coach and object of the fans’ disaffection. “For three quarters we were stuck in the mud.”
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That, in truth, would’ve been a better option than sitting through the rest of this deplorable basketball game — Kings 113, Knicks 92. The awkward silences were filled with angry screeds of freelance venom. The Kings’ relentless assault was met with boos, and, later, worse, indifference.
See, this was really the first cold-water-to-the-face day of the Knicks’ season. You can tell yourself a thousand times a day that they aren’t any good, and they had mostly honored that cynicism across the first six games, losing five.
But in all of them, until now, there were scraps of hope scattered across the mud. There was Friday night in Boston, feisty game, nice comeback, a little genuine heartbreak when Jayson Tatum knocked down a shot late for the Celtics.
Oh yes: You can talk yourself into delusion, too.
And then along comes a stinker like this, a game where the fans should be given nose plugs at the door, or small bottles of Glade. You knew you’d get a couple of these this year, because the Knicks aren’t a very good team. But neither are the Kings. This was bad. This was very bad.
“Unacceptable,” was the term Fizdale used. There are others.
“We’ve got to start figuring this out,” Julius Randle said.
All of the Knicks’ warts were on full display against the 1-5 (now 2-5) Kings: an utter lack of interior defense; long spasms of inefficiency on both ends; an offense that lacks even a whisker of sophistication. They do play hard, and playing hard is nice, but playing hard is supposed to come with the paycheck. That is an expectation, not a consolation.
If you want to take solace in watching Mitchell Robinson’s development, there is that. And RJ Barrett getting after it, that is always there for you, too. A few things are clear about Barrett after only seven games of his career: He cares deeply, and he wants to get better, and it kills him that he isn’t a better foul shooter. Also: Fizdale is going to play him. A lot. Unabashedly.
“We’ve got to get off this load-management crap,” Fizdale said, in a rare display of testiness. “He’s 19. Drop it.”
But you can also tell by his body language that he is already wearying of the losing. Sunday’s calamity means he’s already lost as many games this year as he did last year, and Duke’s season doesn’t even start until Tuesday — at the Garden, of all places, when the Blue Devils play Kansas.
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“We’ve got to figure this out,” he said. “They punched us in the mouth from the get-go.”
Cry no rivers for Barrett: He left cozy Cameron Indoor knowing he was certain to join a lousy team as a top draft pick, and that’s what he’s gotten. He is the crown jewel on a mishmash roster, at the start of a week when the Knicks will see their erstwhile jewel at the end, when they’ll get Kristaps Porzingis in Dallas on Friday night.
Besides, there’s so much more to weep about. In a cranky New York autumn, with so many sporting skells hearing the business end of a city’s displeasure, Fizdale had his name dropped on the same griddle where Adam Gase is presently being fricasseed. It was bound to happen sometime. A November no-show against a team stuck in the same low-rent district where the Knicks currently reside?
That’s as good a place to start as any.
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