CLEVELAND _ The Knicks were loose Monday morning as they prepared for their game against the Cavaliers hours later. The front-office executives were all here, scattered around the seats just off the court and when the work was done players trash-talked their way through one-on-one competitions and Mario Hezonja was showing off his soccer skills, kicking a ball into the upper deck of Quicken Loans Arena.
If you didn't know better you might not know that the Knicks were facing a humbling bit of history _ facing the Cavs in a battle to see who would be the worst team in the NBA and also the possibility of a 17-game losing streak, which would be the worst single-season stretch in franchise history.
But they know. And if the plan set in place was bound for this outcome, they want you to know that they _ the players and coaches _ are not tanking. If the losses come steadily, they still are enduring it with a hope of better days coming from it.
"Yeah, a lot of fans, they always say some dumb stuff," Knicks rookie Kevin Knox said. "You see it all the time with the tanking and want us to lose, stuff like that. It's kind of stupid. They're not really true New Yorkers. Real Knicks fans know that we're trying to just take this year to kind of just develop us young guys and then next year hopefully make a push.
"Every night we're just going to go out and just play hard. We're going to compete at the highest level. We might make some mistakes towards the end of the game, which costs us the loss. For us, just go out there and just compete. We're in a lot of close games with a lot of great teams, playoff teams. That just shows you how close we are from winning those games. We're just missing a couple of pieces. It's really good for us young guys to go out there and play against some of those playoff teams and be able to be in games. We lose to the Raptors by five, it's a playoff team. It's good to see us _ we're getting better every single game."
It is that hope that they cling to, that keeps them going when none of them have ever gone through anything like this. The Knicks knew this would be a difficult season when it began with Kristaps Porzingis expected to miss most or all of the season, and even that distant hope that he would be back to change things abruptly ended when he was traded ahead of the trade deadline on Jan. 31.
The Knicks sat veterans much of the season, and depending on your perspective, it was either to allow the young players to develop or to continue the chase to the bottom of the standings and a shot at the top pick in the NBA draft.
"I think there's actually been teams that have come into games trying to lose a game," Knicks coach David Fizdale said. "That's just not in our vocabulary. Do we play well every night? Do we do enough to win the game every night? Maybe not. But at the end of the day I know these guys are coming out to compete to win.
"(When people say tanking), I don't read it and listen to it, so I don't get caught up in it. I just think there's a difference between losing games and trying to lose games. That's why I think a lot of people have cracked down on just the idea of, you're just coming in to try to lose a game. You're cheating the game. I won't let our players do that."
Still, the results are clear. The Knicks entered Monday's game at 10-45 and if anything, it's gotten worse as they waived veterans Enes Kanter and Wes Matthews last week. It makes the 17-win season the Knicks endured four years ago, which set a new low, seem like an unattainable goal. But Fizdale said getting younger and having fewer weapons doesn't discourage him.
"No, honestly it's not, because we have a plan," Fizdale said. "If I would've came into this thing thinking one thing and now all of a sudden it's this, yeah, of course. But, no, I came into it expecting the worst. And preparing myself for the absolute worst. So now we're at a place where we did, by moving Kristaps, that made us younger. That made us a little more unseasoned. But at the same time that's still sticking to what we said we were going to do. Really develop, build through the draft, open up cap space. That's where we are right now and I'm really happy that we've stuck to the plan."
The plan as described last summer _ another lottery pick, free-agent stars coming aboard _ didn't include trading away Porzingis, who the team portrayed as the centerpiece of the rebuild until he was dealt away. But Fizdale defended the move.
"Well, you don't have a choice. What's your option?" he said. "You're going to lose him. So you're going to sit there and not have nothing sitting there? Or do you want to have two picks, cap space and a heck of a point guard in Dennis Smith Jr., who's in his second year?
"You can't control every single thing that happens along the way. But if your response is sticking to the plan, according to the plan, according to what's happened, I think it's the right way to go. Because a lot of times what you can get caught up in in a situation like that is falling off plan and starting to chase shiny things. And now you're stuck with somebody that you don't necessarily want at a high price. And we didn't do that. We stuck to right from what we said from the beginning and that's what's given me a lot of confidence with these guys."
