The Oklahoma City Thunder entered The Garden on Monday without two of its top players (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Lu Dort) and with 12 losses in its last 15 games.
The fact that they walked off the floor with an overtime win tells you a lot about this Knicks season.
Two days after blowing a 23-point lead to the Portland Trail Blazers, the Knicks let the young, struggling, shorthanded Thunder beat them at MSG.
The Knicks had plenty of opportunities to win the game. But they struggled to execute down the stretch. New York had eight turnovers in the fourth quarter and overtime and missed 21 of its final 30 shots.
The club might have had a chance to set up a play at the end of regulation but wasted its timeout with 40 seconds to play. Tom Thibodeau called timeout with the intent to challenge a foul call on Quentin Grimes but he and his staff didn’t have a challenge available. The Knicks had challenged a call less than 30 seconds earlier, which was their lone challenge.
“That was my fault. I screwed that up,” Thibodeau said after the game. He acknowledged that he thought he had another challenge. “I just lost my train of thought there for a second.”
Thibodeau seemed to push all the right buttons last season. He won Coach of the Year after the Knicks finished with the fourth-best record in the Eastern Conference.
Obviously, Thibodeau hasn’t forgotten how to coach over the last eight months. The Knicks’ struggles are the result of everyone – team president Leon Rose on down – making misguided decisions.
But Thibodeau’s rotations haven’t yielded results. The game-management on Monday was poor. And the production late in close games has been an issue for much of the season.
Is Thibodeau’s seat warming up? He’s in the second year of a five-year contract. He is Rose’s hand-picked coach.
It’s hard to see a scenario where Thibodeau is fired during this season. But stranger things have happened in New York.
The Knicks host the Nets on Wednesday in their final game before the All-Star break.
They’re 13-16 at home and 25-33 overall. The remaining schedule is a challenge. If the bottom keeps falling out for this team, someone will be held accountable. That’s the way things work in pro sports, especially in a market like New York and with a franchise like the Knicks.
As they say, you can’t fire all the players when a team underperforms. So the coach becomes the easiest target.
