Mike Lupica: Knicks still need to prove this can be more than just a good season

The Knicks need to show up on Sunday afternoon against the Celtics because if they don’t show up against a team better than they are, when do they the rest of the regular season, and why should anybody think they will in the playoffs? We all saw what happened on Friday night in Cleveland against the Cavs when, long before halftime, it was already fair to ask if the Knicks knew the game counted. You hear all the time that the regular season doesn’t matter all that much in the NBA. Yeah, it does, especially when you’ve got a team being carried along by the roar of the crowd, the way the Knicks are, but rarely show up against the best teams. This season the best teams are the Cavs, Thunder, Celtics. They Knicks have yet to get a game off any of them. And if this is another season when the Knicks can’t get past the second round of the playoffs, something no Knicks team has done in 25 years, then their fans will have a perfect right to think their team is still stuck in the middle, even the way they have moved up this season in the Eastern Conference. Because the reality of their situation under Leon Rose and Tom Thibodeau is that their most dramatic playoff victory so far is over the 76ers and Joel Embiid, playing on one leg at the time. Have they come back a long way since Rose and Thibodeau got to town? You know they have. Do they matter again? They do, and loudly. But now a team that has come back this far needs to show it can keep going. They need to own New York in the spring even with the Yankees and Mets looking loaded again, the way Pat Riley’s Knicks and Jeff Van Gundy’s Knicks did in the ’90s. But they can’t do it losing to Trae Young in the first round, the way they did a few years ago, at the very start of the road back. They can’t do it losing to the Heat in the second round, the way they did two years ago, or to the Pacers last year, even though they were as wounded by the time they got to the Eastern Conference semis as they were back in 2000, when the Pacers took them out in six in the Eastern Conference finals, the official end of the ’90s in Basketball New York. “We didn’t make it all the way to where we wanted to go, obviously,” Dave Checketts, who brought Riley to New York and brought the Knicks back in the ’90s, told me once. “We didn’t beat Michael and didn’t win it all. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a time.” We did. Now the Knicks are giving us another one over the past few years after having spent most of this century acting like the basketball Jets. Now they look that way again against the Cavs, Thunder, Celtics, despite having compiled one of the better records in the league against everybody else. It is why, coming off the way they got clowned in Cleveland, they need to show that they can at least give the Celtics a game on Sunday, after not coming close to doing that in their two previous meetings this season, either at their Garden or ours. The Celtics rolled them on Opening Night and they rolled them a couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday night that turned out to be as much of a disappointment as LeBron and the Lakers putting it on the Knicks one week earlier. The Celtics didn’t merely dominate the Knicks in those two games. They were dismissive of them, even though the Knicks are right there behind them in the standings. Here it is: Could the Knicks get a playoff series off the Celtics if the Celtics stop making about a hundred 3-pointers a game? Absolutely, they could. If the Timberwolves could upset the defending champion Nuggets in last year’s playoffs, Knick fans have to hope their guys have the firepower and the talent to do the same. The difference is that the Timberwolves, a team on which Karl-Anthony Towns played, had at least beaten the champs twice during the regular season and the Knicks haven’t come close this season, so far, against the defending champs from Boston. The Knicks of 2025 are entertaining and complicated and occasionally as embarrassing as they looked on Friday night in Cleveland, when they were already behind 77-50 at halftime and nearly got rung up for 150 points in the end. They really are as much fun to watch on offense as any Knicks team in 50 years, without question. But the glory-road Knicks of the ’60s and ’70s were known as much for the great Red Holzman’s see-the-ball defense as for the beautiful game they played on offense. These Knicks are known for playing hardly any hard defense at all. There are plenty of star players in the NBA who don’t play nearly enough defense, so that hardly makes Jalen Brunson and Towns unique in that regard. This is surely not meant to disparage how much Brunson and Towns have meant this season, or alter the pretty wonderful fact that Brunson truly is the most important Knick since Patrick Ewing got to the Garden from Georgetown. But when stops are needed in the postseason as much as pops, they are going to have to do more, and that means a whole lot more. Maybe if they can ever keep Mitchell Robinson on the floor — and if as big as he is — it will make things easier on everybody. For now there are still just too many nights, not just Friday night, when they give up way too many points, and that means even with OG Anunoby at full strength. Do the losses to the Cavs, Thunder, Celtics define the entire season? They don’t. And yet, in so many big ways, they do. No one would suggest that these Knicks are soft. You saw what would have been a bad loss to a bad team like the Bulls turn into a terrific win at the end when Mikal Bridges got that block at the end of regulation. They have earned their way to where they are in the Eastern Conference, where they keep getting as close as possible to the Celtics before then falling back. The season isn’t over if the Celtics put it on them again on Sunday the way the Cavs put it on them Friday night. It’s just that Knicks fans will feel a lot better about everything if their team can finally get a game off the champs. And gain some belief, with a third of the regular season to go, that what has been another good season for the Knicks can become more than that. At last. NBA COULD LEARN SOMETHING FROM THE NHL, NOT ANOTHER AGING QB & GET ME THE TKACHUKS … The USA team did the memory of Johnny Gaudreau proud in the 4 Nations Face-Off, didn’t it? And by the way? The hockey players from those four countries not only did themselves and their sport proud, they made the All-Star Game(s) of the National Basketball Association look like even more of a joke than it already did. Some of the best hockey players in the world did this by somehow overcoming the fear of injury that we’re told is the main reason the NBA stars turn their All-Star Game(s) into a pillow fight. You hear now that the format at the NBA’s All-Star Weekend — whatever that format was — produced more competitive action than usual. It just shows you how low the bar had been set over the past several years. At this point in time, the NBA has become a wildly overrated product. No matter how cool they clearly think they are. Or how much money they’re raking in. One more thing about last Sunday night’s All-Star Game(s): Who thought at the NBA, or TNT, thought it was some kind of great idea to let Kevin Hart turn the whole thing into open-mic night at the Chuckle Hut? So the Yankees are finally allowing facial hair — in 2025 AD — this season. But they have to be “neatly trimmed” beards. If not, the players who do have beards lose their internet privileges. When Steve Cohen told Howie Rose the other day that Scott Boras sat there without saying a word when Cohen was closing Pete Alonso’s deal, I’m almost certain another angel got wings. I love the way Matthew Stafford has always competed, even before he finally got to L.A. and got his Super Bowl. Love his heart as much as I love his arm. And we all know that Stafford almost had a ball in the air to beat the Eagles in the snow. But say it again: What could possibly go wrong? Stafford is younger, at 37, than Aaron Rodgers, you bet. But when Rodgers was basically the same age Stafford is now, he threw 26 touchdown passes for the Packers against 12 interceptions, had 3,695 passing yards and a passer rating of 91.1 Last season for the Rams, playing 16 games for the Rams instead of the 17 Rodgers played in his last season in Green Bay, Stafford threw 20 touchdown passes against eight picks, had 3,762 passing yards, and a passer rating of 93.7. Was Rafael Devers not aware until he arrived in Fort Myers than Alex Cora is the one managing the Boston Red Sox? Who among us isn’t happy that Paul George was able to get some nice vacation time with his wife during the break? Hasn’t that pretty much been his whole season? Sean McDonough’s work calling both Canada vs. USA games was just tremendous. I don’t know about you, but I want the Tkachuk brothers on speed dial.