The New York Knicks, currently tied for the worst record in the NBA at 2-8, trotted out their front office reps Sunday night to publicly express displeasure with the team’s state of affairs.
General manager Scott Perry and president of basketball ops Steve Mills faced reporters after conferring with owner James Dolan during an embarrassing 108-87 home loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Dolan “still believes in the plan that we put together,” according to his lieutenants.
Per Newsday:
“I mean, Jim still believes in the plan we put together,” Mills said. “But he’s passionate as we are about this. He would want us to have better results on the floor as well. But I think Jim is a fan and believes in what we’re doing. But he has the same kind of expectations that we have. This is really about how we feel about what we should be doing, what we should be delivering as a group. We all take responsibility for that.”
The Knicks remade the team, and other than an effort such as Friday’s win in Dallas, which seems like an anomaly when measured against the other games, it has been a massive letdown.
“Obviously, Scott and I are not happy with where we are right now,” Mills said. “We think the team is not performing to the level that we anticipated or we expected to perform at, and that’s something that we think we collectively have to do a better job of delivering the product on the floor that we said we would do at the start of this season.
“We still believe in our coaching staff. We believe in the plan Scott and I put together and the players that we assembled. But we also have to acknowledge that we haven’t played at the level we expected to play at. We haven’t played.”
[Head coach David] Fizdale tried to defuse some of the panic, noting, “A good friend of mine told me to never overreact to overreactors. We’re two games from the eighth seed. The team that’s in the eighth seed right now has four wins. So it’s not that like, oh my God, everybody’s acting like the world is coming to an end. It’s not. We just have to find our consistency in our games so we can start playing better basketball.”
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