Kristian Winfield: Knicks' embarrassing loss to Rockets shouldn't be a surprise

Forget about the Eastern Conference’s No. 2 seed. The Knicks are closer to falling out of the East’s top-three than they are to catching the Boston Celtics — or the top-seeded Detroit Pistons — in the standings.

And that’s bad news, because the way this team is playing in the tail end of a season littered with championship expectations, home-court advantage at The World’s Most Famous Arena could easily be the deciding factor in a seven-game series with a trip to the NBA Finals — or the consequences associated with failing to reach the league’s biggest stage — hanging in the balance.

The Knicks certainly could have used the Madison Square Garden crowd on Tuesday.

In truth, the slow starts, the disjointed offense and the disconnected defense haven’t been Knicks miscues unique to road games this season. It’s becoming increasingly clear with each passing game against high-level competition that this is exactly who these Knicks are.

And who they are is 17 points worse than the Western Conference’s sixth-seeded Houston Rockets, who handed the Knicks their third loss in a row with a 111-94 victory on Tuesday. The Rockets are a team that lost its starting point guard (Fred VanVleet) at the start of the year while the Knicks brought back and built upon the exact same core that punched the franchise’s first ticket to the conference finals in the last quarter-century.

The Knicks have not lived up to expectations — not even close, not even with just three wins over their final six games to tie last season’s 51-win mark. These are not Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks. This is the Mike Brown remix. And the remix, despite its high-highs, has been defined by its low-lows.

And when the Knicks are low, they are a hot mess. In what’s become typical Knicks fashion, the team wearing orange and blue spotted the Rockets a 12-1 lead to start the game — 10 coming from Kevin Durant, who finished with 27 points on 10-of-18 shooting from the field. The Rockets outscored the Knicks by 28 in Durant’s 35 minutes on the court. The Knicks only truly made things interesting in minutes the former Brooklyn Nets star and sure-fire first-ballot Hall of Famer spent on the bench on Tuesday.

And what’s become even more typical than the slow starts could be nail in their postseason coffin: a continued, ostensibly unending icing-out of Karl-Anthony Towns’ first-half scoring opportunities. For the third game in a row, Towns — a six-time All-Star specifically for his scoring gifts — was invisible on offense in the first half before imposing his will over the second two quarters as the Knicks attempted to punch themselves back into a game.

Towns took just four shots in the first half — two shots a quarter — before taking four shots in the third quarter and a whopping nine shots in the fourth quarter. In the second half, the Knicks began making a concerted effort to get their All-Star big man the ball.

This issue? It was an unnatural offensive flow for a team that hasn’t prioritized Towns virtually all season. And Jalen Brunson, the snake leading the Knicks’ offensive charge, also looked uncomfortable, as did his final stat line: 12 points on 5-of-14 shooting from the field, eight assists and three turnovers.

The Knicks were outscored by 26 in Brunson’s 36 minutes of action on Tuesday. It’s the most the Knicks have been outscored by in minutes with Brunson on the floor since his arrival in New York in the summer of 2022.

Yet this is part of a trend that’s defined the Knicks’ first season under Brown, one that also predated Brown’s arrival as a through-line over the course of last season’s playoff run.

The Knicks may dog-walk teams attempting to lose on purpose — and often they escape those games by narrow margins. But against the cream of the crop, against the NBA’s elite, they revert back to their poor, old habits or look uncomfortable attempting to implement an offense still rife with kinks as the Knicks stare down the latter stretch of the season.

Case in point: The Rockets traded Jalen Green and Dillon Brooks — two integral pieces of their roster — to the Phoenix Suns for Durant and lost their starting point guard at the start of the season. Yet the Rockets more closely resemble the kind of well-oiled machine the Knicks aspire to be, despite the Knicks bringing back the core responsible for punching the franchise’s first conference finals appearance in the last 25 years.

Mikal Bridges finished with seven points on 3-of-4 shooting from the field. Josh Hart added 13 points, five rebounds and two assists, and Jose Alvarado scored 12 points in less than 12 minutes off the bench.

All five Rockets starters scored in double figures, led by 27 from Durant, 20 from young point guard Reed Sheppard off the bench, and 17 points plus tough point-of-attack defense on Brunson from Amen Thompson.

The Knicks will have a chance to get another mark in the win column over their next two games against the Memphis Grizzlies and Chicago Bulls. They are favored to win those games, because those are teams more concerned about lottery positioning than playoff seeding.

But when the Knicks play against teams their own caliber, they don’t answer the bell. That’s a problem. Because there’s no telling how many times this bell will ring before changes are ushered in.