Sorry for the lack of a game thread tonight, folks. I had left my apartment around 5:00 PM, and I thought that was too early to presume no one else was handling the game thread. In the future, I’ll just schedule a game thread before I go to go up about a half hour before the game and if someone else wants to do a more in-depth one, they can just replace mine before it posts (and as I said in the comments, I checked on my phone during intermission at a musical and I saw the Knicks were up so I didn’t want to jinx them by starting a game thread then. I see that that did not matter in the end).
Now that I’ve watched the replay of the game, it was an interesting game. Probably the biggest thing I will take from the game is the same thing that I was going to say before the game, which is that the Knicks are now at a point where they can hang with pretty much any team. They’re not really good enough to win a lot, but they’re hanging in there and hanging in there is a sign of a team who is good enough to be around the fringes of the playoffs (the 2013-14 team that won 37 games was a perfect example of that sort of fringe team who could hang with good teams – just not typically win the games in the end) and that is A. a lot more fun to watch than a team that has no chance against any half-decent team but more importantly, B. it is great experience for Zinger, who is really the main reason to watch this team this year, to see how far he can go and to continue to be impressed by how far he has already come in his short NBA career (think about it, the dude is specifically reversing what he did in Europe! Who does that? Who takes his weaknesses as a pre-NBA player and makes them his strengths as an NBA player in year one?! That’s ludicrous! That’s outstanding!).
I’ve said before that Lance Thomas is sort of oddly the bellwether of this team, in that if he has a good game, the Knicks can beat good teams. When he doesn’t, like tonight, well, the Knicks just don’t have enough guys. You can credit the Cavaliers defense in the fourth quarter, and there is something to be said for that, but the fourth quarter offensive collapse seemed to be more about poor execution by the Knicks than great defense by the Cavaliers. Lebron James scored 12 points in the fourth. That’s impressive. But it’s more impressive when you know that the entire Knicks team scored…12 points in the fourth. Dang.
Carmelo Anthony was electric through three quarters, probably playing his best game of the season, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t working in the fourth (again, Lebron’s strong defense was a help). Zinger had a decent game, as did Arron Afflalo.
Langston Galloway sadly had perhaps his worst game of the season. 3-9 from the field and some weak defense.
I never quite got the Kevin Seraphim signing and now it looks like the Knicks are even shrugging their shoulders with him. “Eh, we gave him a shot and now he’s done.”
The Knicks get the New Orleans Pelicans on Sunday and Anthony Davis continues to be day-to-day with a sore hip. The Pelicans are playing so poorly that the game should be a winnable one whether he plays or not. They host Charlotte on Tuesday in the hopes of getting revenge on them before embarking on a really tough stretch of games for the rest of November (two games against Houston, two against Miami and one against OKC, sandwiched around one against the surprisingly not that bad Orlando Magic – heck, right now, Orlando is outperforming Houston). So it’d be nice to get to .500 before that stretch of games to close out the month.