Nobody ever wins the Masters on Saturday. Ultimately you hope to be at your very best by the final nine holes Sunday afternoon. The back nine is where the drama always takes place: where balls plunk into the water on 15 or 17, where heroic sand saves are made, where tournament-clinching putts are drained, where green jackets are exchanged.
You can’t win it Saturday.
But you can sure lose it on Saturday. And that’s why, for all time, Saturday at Augusta National is known as “moving day.” Saturday is when you set yourself up for Sunday, when you jockey into position on Sunday. You can shoot a lights-out 64 on Sunday but it won’t mean anything if you finish Saturday at the bottom of the leader board.
The Knicks can’t finalize what they’re going to be in the five weeks between now and the trading deadline on Feb. 8. But they can sure put themselves in place to make things interesting on the back end of this season. The Knicks play 20 games between now and Feb. 10, two days after the deadline, a quarter-season slice that will probably tell us all we’ll need to know about them.
Fourteen of those games are at Madison Square Garden, where they’re owed a bunch of home games after spending so much of the season’s first 2 ½ months on the road — and that doesn’t include the bonus home game the league awarded them last week, moving the Feb. 26 game with the Pistons from Detroit to New York to even an imbalance caused by the midseason tournament.
And of the six the Knicks play away from home, only in two — at Philadelphia on Friday, then at Dallas next Thursday — will they be likely to be substantial underdogs.
It’s moving day for the Knicks.
The Knicks just emerged from the most brutal stretch of their schedule with their season still intact and their record still three games north of .500. From Dec. 5 through New Year’s Day, the Knicks played 14 games, and 12 were against teams who are either at .500 or better or were when the Knicks played them. Ten of them were on the road. They went 6-8.
There will be no sonnets written about that 14-game stretch of the Knicks season, but when the final book is published on this season, we may well look back at December and see that this is where they survived a gauntlet that could have been fundamentally and grievously hazardous. They are tied for the seventh seed in the East, half a game out of sixth, a full game out of fifth. It’s all still there for them.
“We need to start stacking wins,” Jalen Brunson said last week.
And that’s where this stretch is so important. The Knicks kicked off the new year Monday with a feel-good 112-106 win over the Timberwolves, the best team in the Western Conference. There were times as they built a 22-point lead when the Garden felt like the most fun place in the world to be watching a basketball game, and even as Minnesota kept shaving the lead the Knicks embraced a pleasing two-way game that left most of the regulars hoarse with hope.
OG Anunoby’s debut certainly provided a call-back to the way the Knicks positively responded to the Josh Hart deal last year; the key now is to turn that hint into a full-blown connection as they begin this 20-game push Wednesday night against the Bulls at the Garden. Stacking some wins in this opportune moment of the calendar will serve two things:
- The East is going to be a down-to-the-wire proposition on two fronts: Boston, Philly and Milwaukee are almost certain to be fighting for the 1, 2 and 3 seed. And then there are no fewer than eight teams — the Knicks and Nets both — who have to believe they have the goods to fight for the 4 seed (guaranteeing home-court in Round 1) and for the 5 and the 6 (allowing them to steer clear of the play-in).
- If the Knicks do take advantage of this portion of the schedule, which leads right into the trade deadline, then the inevitable second phase of Leon Rose’s in-season reconstruction can take place. It’s still hard to discern what that may be, but a lot can change for teams — and for players — in six weeks. And if the Knicks win themselves into good position, there’s no telling what a yet-to-to-be-restless star on a yet-to-be-determined team might be willing to agree to a change of scenery.
The Knicks kept themselves in the picture across the last month. Now it’s time to draw a more detailed picture of who they are. It’s a key moment in this season. It’s moving day, stretched over the next 39 days.