The Knicks just lost to the Atlanta Hawks in double overtime on Sunday night and without a doubt ran out of gas.
Double overtime on the second night of a back-to-back with the ability to get your 5th straight win is a tough loss to swallow when you are up 8 points with 1:32 left in overtime.
Bright spot, The Knicks won 4 straight. The first 3+ game winning streak in over 3 years.
That might seem like a very strange thing to take pride in, right? I mean an NBA team can't win 3 games in a row at least once a year? It unfortunately is a much bigger deal than we should admit. The Knicks are shifting, whether we can see it now or not.
Before last year, The Brooklyn Nets were the NBA's runt of the litter, right? Nothing exciting with the team other than seeing Jay-Z on the sideline and that mysterious Russian billionaire owner. Well they got lucky with some trades and saw D'Angelo Russell make his way to Brooklyn from LA and stock up some wins with the team, become an All-Star and with the stock price high, they were able to trade him for KEVIN DURANT (albeit a damaged version of him, but KD nonetheless).
The point is that the turnaround in Brooklyn kind of seemed to happen "overnight" with one decent season and showing the league how exciting Brooklyn could be.
The Knicks are doing that!
There is an exciting core of young talented players that should be a draw for any young free agent to come and build with, similar to the Julius Randle signing.
There have unfortunately been some PR missteps with ownership that has undoubtedly soured some people on the organization like LeBron vs Phil Jackson in "Posse-Gate" and James Dolan banning multiple fans for suggesting he should sell the team and also having one of the most beloved 90's Knicks stars forcibly removed from the arena.
Going back to the Knicks young core, you cannot forget or discount the fact of how they are built for the future with tons of draft capital over the next few years. As I mentioned in my last post this provides a virtually unknown landscape of flexibility for the Knickerbocker organization, being able to draft players that will fit into the system or leverage those picks into a trade for a star to help move the needle on the future of the franchise.
You hear it all the time... The NBA is better when the Knicks are relevant. It's a work in progress but we are trending in the right direction.