When your team begins a blowout, it generally starts with some poor decision-making by the other team. NBA players are generally speaking the highest quality basketball players in the world. Given that fact, there is a natural parity, and losing by more than 10 points is a pretty rare occurrence. However, after a certain point, when a team has a flaw exposed, the team that exposes it will begin to abuse it. San Antonio can’t crash the boards, Kobe's ego will cause him to take too many shots, Juwan Howard came off the bench for George Mikan, or whatever. The flawed team will begin to make poor decisions under pressure. The truly great teams do not always win a game, but they do always try to get back into the game, and they know that panicking and taking bad jump shots is not the way to do it unless you’re Roger Mason Jr. Showing calm under pressure may seem like at best saving face or at worst cool indifference, but if the team starts to freak out during a blowout, well, that’s where the Meatloaf song meets the analogy.
via BALL..
Read these words while seeing the Cavs ring up the Knicks like a pinball machine, and they struck me. The Knicks more than any other team in the league have the highest potential for blowout. Even the Nets will put together a good quarter from time to time when facing a monster game by the opponent. But D’Antoni’s system combined with their roster makeup and the fact that those guys have to wonder what the point is, given their situation, leads to abject disaster.
It doesn’t mean that the Knicks are the worst team in the league. It’s a league of professionals. And as such, it’s hard to be truly putrid. Casting the Nets as such is to ignore a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Real failure in the NBA is consistent mediocrity. The Pacers are a failure. The Bobcats, prior to this year, are very close to failure. But a rebuilding effort in total is going to lead to some blowouts.
Still, it’s interesting that the Knicks fall prey to it so often. If you say “New York” and “blowout” I always think of “that time I cried blood.” Which is, by the way, the single greatest game recap in the history of the internet. Different coach, different players (somewhat), and yet they’re still having meltdowns like this. D’Antoni also had this problem in Phoenix, though. He’d have nights where the shots wouldn’t fall, and the pace would maintain, and the missed shots lead to long rebounds, and the rebounds lead to easier breaks, and it just compounds. Slowing the game down can mask some of those problems. A fast-paced system on a bad night is like shoving the failure under a microscope. It’s a time-lapse video of blown assignments and failed offensive sets.
Getting blown out isn’t the worst thing in the world, but you still feel like the Knicks that have lived through the last three years are going to carry these with them throughout their careers.
