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Every once in a while it’s perfectly enjoyable to play a game like this, to welcome a team like these Sacramento Kings into your house, because in many ways they’re like the perfect enemy of the game back in. the House. They are fun to watch, with lots of dazzling young stars.
And they can’t keep a stop sign.
This is how a team that will never be confused with Paul Westhead’s former Loyola Marymount teams can score 140 points in a single basketball game, as the Knicks did before a satisfied rally of a little less of 2,000 fans at Madison Square Garden Thursday night.
There were times when Tom Thibodeau, the whisperers’ defense coach, seemed to faint watching the Knicks surrender 121, but only coaches really have the spirit of games like this. As long as the home team finishes on the left side of the hyphen, customers will be happy. And the Knicks, for the third time in the past 10 days, have crawled in a single .500 game.
“We’re getting there,” Thibodeau said.
At 16-17, the Knicks are also slowly progressing towards the halfway point of the season, three games down of 36, so we’ve officially reached the point where we can ask ourselves, with data and information and 33 testimonials, exactly. what our recalibrated standard as this season should be.
Is it still okay to focus exclusively on the process?
Now is it OK to focus on the possibility of the playoffs?
“I would say just as important,” Thibodeau said about 90 minutes before the game. “I don’t want us to get lost and go too far. I just want us to focus on what lies ahead. I think you start the season with [playoffs] in mind and all the things you need to do.
“You want to build these habits consistently. It is important to train well, to know your opponent well. If you start to pull away from that and look too far down the road, that’s when you’re going to cut yourself and fall.
Fair enough. Still, the wins made it a lot more of a winning habit than anyone thought realistic in Thibodeau’s first year. They were, remember, by virtual Vegas consensus assigned an Over / Under number of 22.5 wins. They are way ahead of this pace. They are, in fact, square in the middle of an Eastern conference which, for the moment, seems to be divided into three different castes:
The clear elite: The Sixers, the Nets and (despite a few shoddy games recently) the Bucks.
Teams that have fought but insist on logic and common sense will straighten out and make a comfortable push to the top five: the Celtics and the Heat.
Scrambling for locations 6 to 10.
And that’s where this season for the Knicks gets terribly intriguing, as on Friday morning they wake up tied with the Raptors for fifth place, engaged in what will almost certainly be a seven-team rock fight for the last five spots. in the playoffs in the East. Right now the Knicks, Pacers, Raptors, Bulls, Hornets, Hawks and Magic are all three of each other in the standings. Five of those seven will come in (assuming you don’t believe Washington’s recent turnaround is permanent; if you do, it’s five of eight).
All of these teams have flaws and flaws, just like the Knicks. Neither team has a reasonable chance of making noise during the playoffs, assuming things fall into place the way they likely will in the second half. And so all will ask the same thing:
Playoff process?
Playoffs on the process?
Both?
Both are ideal. But are both realistic?
“Just think about what it’s like to win every day and develop the right habits,” Thibodeau said before the game.
“We’re getting there,” he said afterwards, twice.
Where, finally? On Saturday the Pacers arrive at the backyard, and suddenly there’s a lot of intriguing stuff going on. Another crack at .500. A chance to beat a team in this crowded pile of suitors and suitors waiting to be sifted to one side or the other over the next few months.
And, of course: working on the process, which means keeping an eye on the price, which means not getting too far ahead of themselves. Beats again when thinking of the playoffs existing only in feverish dreams. Maybe they can coexist after all.
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