ruruland: 4 of those teamsmade the finals, 6 made the conference championship.

The Knicks are unlikely to face a superior team in the first two round, and what I’m telling you is that Melo is not going to let the Knicks lose to one of those teams.

The Knicks could lose to Miami or Chicago in the east, that’s it.

You wanna lament about losing to good teams in the playoffs?? How about having to watch you favorite team lose to the eventual NBA champion for 5 straight seasons (1990-1994) and doing so twice in the semis, once in the conf finals and once in the NBA Finals (in 7 games at that). Also losing 5 different times to Michael Jordan in the playoffs. To make matters even more frustrating they lost to him 3 times in the semis (went 7 games once) and the ultimate dagger lost to him in the conf finals while having the homecourt advantage and being up 2-0 in the series.

Now thats something to lament about!! lol

But sure, I could see the argument to be made that the Knicks should not even worry about the second round and just concentrate on getting past the first. Personally, a second round loss is fine by me. I’d be happy with that. I just want to see a first round win. The last time they won a round was just waaaaaaay too long ago.

4 of those teams made the finals, 6 made the conference championship.

The Knicks are unlikely to face a superior team in the first two round, and what I’m telling you is that Melo is not going to let the Knicks lose to one of those teams.

The Knicks could lose to Miami or Chicago in the east, that’s it.

You know I’m with you in round one. For round two, it really does help that it seems like there is a good chance that the Knicks and Bulls won’t be in the same bracket (having the Knicks’ two worst matchups play each other in the second round would be sweet) but it is way too early to be too confident about that, no? Are you really that confident that the Knicks won’t fall to #4? Or that the Bulls won’t rise to #2 or #3?

ruruland:

The Knicks could lose to Miami or Chicago in the east, that’s it.

yeah, no way they could lose to Indiana. come on, man.

in the meantime, it doesn’t especially matter what Melo wants. if Kidd doesn’t come back to life and JR doesn’t wake up, this team is pretty much fucked.

Brian Cronin:
While I definitely agree that the ship is not sinking and this is almost assuredly just a bad stretch by a good team (while the 18-5 stretch was similarly a great stretch by a good team), I don’t get the whole “Melo won’t let them lose” thing. I certainly don’t blame Melo for all of his first round losses, as losses are team efforts, of course, but it just seems weird to posit that he won’t let them lose in the first round when he’s lost in the first round of the playoffs in eight of the nine playoffs he’s appeared in. I think that they’ll win in the first round, as well, but I think it’ll be because they will be playing a team worse than them, not because Melo willed them to win or refused to lose or anything like that.

4 of those teams made the finals, 6 made the conference championship.

The Knicks are unlikely to face a superior team in the first two round, and what I’m telling you is that Melo is not going to let the Knicks lose to one of those teams.

The Knicks could lose to Miami or Chicago in the east, that’s it.

BigBlueAL: Gotta admit, dunno how you can maintain this amount of optimism after games like tonight considering you are talking about a team/franchise that hasnt won a playoff series in 13 years.

I used to feel this way about teams like the 1994-95 Knicks who started out 12-12 (then finished 43-15) or the 1999-00 Knicks who started out 11-9 w/o Ewing and after playing great once he returned they blew the division down the stretch to the Heat (reached Conference Finals by sweeping 1st round and beating Heat in semis).But of course those teams had gone to the NBA Finals the season before so there was reason to have faith in them.

I still have faith in this team because I dont believe the other teams in the East are good enough to knock them down below a 3 seed but barring a trade by tomorrow’s deadline its getting harder and harder to stay optimistic about how good this team is unless we start seeing better results on the court.

Just wait. Every fan base reacts the same way after a stretch like this, regardless of what the data or anything else says.

I’m as confident in this as I was in a major run last year when this place was a morgue, and as confident as I was before the season started.

Every 50 win team I’ve closely followed had an extended stretch of mediocrity where fans wanted to blow the team up.

This Knicks teams is likely better than all of those teams.

Stick with it during these times it will make the run that much sweeter. Melo and co. will not let the Knicks lose in the first round again, I promise that.