At the season’s halfway point, Josh Hart expressed frustration after the Knicks’ loss to the Detroit Pistons on Monday night with the team’s energy and execution.
Playing on the second night of a back-to-back and against a plucky team riding a decent run of form, the Knicks expected a tough test against the Detroit Pistons.
“We got a tough team [Monday], a young team that’s gonna run,” forward Josh Hart said from the locker room after Sunday afternoon’s blowout win over the Milwaukee Bucks. “We gotta make sure we come out with attention to detail and intensity.”
Around 30 hours later, Hart was back in the locker room at Madison Square Garden after a 124-119 defeat to the Pistons, a game which saw the Knicks fall behind by 11 early when they committed six turnovers in the first quarter.
“We gotta find a way to bring energy, to execute. We can have all the excuses in the world, we gotta go out there and play,” said Hart, who finished with 12 points on 3-for-5 shooting with 14 rebounds, five assists and just one turnover for a plus-6 in 38 minutes against Detroit.
“We gotta have a sense of urgency, attention to detail, have to communicate better, we got things that we gotta start figuring out,” he added.
“You have a challenge every night in this league,” head coach Tom Thibodeau said. “You’re playing a team that is very hot right now and they’re shooting the ball very well… credit to them they’re playing great basketball. We’re on a back-to-back, [but] just find a way to get it done.”
“You know defensively we gotta be better,” Hart said, before taking a long pause, looking past the assembled reporters and adding, “Yeah, we just gotta be better.”
With the loss, New York fell to 26-15 as they reached the season’s midpoint losers of five of the past seven games. When asked to reflect on playing the 41st game of the campaign, Hart’s frustration over the latest loss was apparent.
“We’re losing games I feel like we shouldn’t be losing,” he said. “We gotta figure it out. We’re halfway into the season now at this point. Nothing we can do about the first half now. Now all we got to do is focus on the second. But, if we want to be the team that we want to be at the end of the year, we gotta start correcting these [mistakes].”
What mistakes do they need to correct?
“We’ll talk about it in the locker room and figure it out,” he answered. “And in terms of some of the stuff, [it’s] just energy execution, honestly.”
On the night, the stats tell a story of a close game: Both teams shot 50 percent from the field, both teams made 15 three-pointers, both teams had about the same number of rebounds (New York got three more, in fact), and both teams committed 21 fouls.
But the turnovers: 17 for the Knicks and just 11 for the Pistons.
“Our turnovers were too high tonight,” the head coach said. “That hurt us.”
“We gotta find a way to get that done, it comes down to a one-position game, basically. And we fell short,” Thibodeau said. “We gotta take a look at it and see what we can do better. And we continue to fight to win every possession in a game. You never know which possession it is, that makes the difference.
“And so, you get locked in, get ready for Philly [on Wednesday].”
Jalen Brunson, who scored 31 points on 12-for-24 shooting with 11 assists and four rebounds, but was a minus-12 in 39 minutes and went 1-for-7 from three, saw improvement, from earlier in the year, but plenty of room for growth.
“We’ve gotten better from where we’ve [been], but there’s still a long way to go,” Brunson said. “Continue to just have the mindset of getting better every day. It’s the same no matter what game it is, and it can be game 82, and then just our mindset is still to get better.”
Thibodeau agreed the Knicks are “better than we were when we first started” the season, but “there’s still a long way to go.”
“I think, from a mentality standpoint, focusing on daily improvement with the understanding that you want to be playing your best at the end [of the season],” he said. “And there’s a lot of challenges throughout the course of the season. So there’s ups and downs and you have to handle that. You have to get through things together.
“But you never can lose sight of how important it is to improve every day and then hopefully in the end you’re playing your best basketball.”
