Mike Brown’s midterm Knicks exam is here — and he must turn things around

Forty-one down. Forty-one to go. The Knicks crashed into the midpoint of their season like Otis the town drunk stumbling into a wall. Those back-to-back California stink bombs in Sacramento and San Francisco signaled an alarm that whatever issues that seemed on the way to resolution when Josh Hart returned in Portland might not be exactly sorting themselves out easily. It wasn’t the losing, necessarily — Jalen Brunson missed 91 of those 96 minutes, and the Knicks aren’t nearly the same team in his absence. It was everything else. The Kings debacle was a team-wide mail-in against a team that has been playing well recently but still only has 11 wins. And the Warriors game was, in its own way, just as stunning: an early 17-point lead that became a footnote thanks to the 99-65 (!) Warriors splurge that followed. They looked listless. They looked disinterested. Karl-Anthony Towns, he looks like he needs to adopt a dog so he’ll have at least one friend more loyal than the ones that passively watched Draymond Green do a sweep-the-leg maneuver straight out of the Cobra Kai playbook.