Knicks arrive at the midpoint of their season with a few nagging questions

It seems like ages ago, almost hard to remember that it was just months ago, that Karl-Anthony Towns was hidden away in Charleston, South Carolina. He was unable to join the Knicks on the practice court for the first three days of training camp, waiting for the trade to New York to be made official.

It’s been about three-and-a-half months since then to reach the midpoint in the season. Maybe it’s worth recalling that start and the questions we had then.

How will the pieces fit? What will this mean for a team that seemed on the verge of being a championship contender? Will they have the depth? Will they have the toughness that used to mark the team?

And now, 41 games in, it’s a simpler question.

Will it work?

We knew what the Knicks were before the offseason moves, a team stockpiled with draft picks and assets, a carefully managed salary cap. And most of all they were a team built in the image of coach Tom Thibodeau, a scrappy, overachieving team that didn’t carry the star power of some teams, but were counted on to provide a 48-minute fight in every game.

The draft picks were spent to obtain Mikal Bridges, another part of the Villanova championship core. And then two key pieces — Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo — were swapped for Towns. And it was really a great experiment: Could two players with immense skills fit in and become Thibodeau players? Add in last season’s midyear deal for OG Anunoby and it’s a new team. It was an all-in gamble by team president Leon Rose and the front office.

And after 41 games we know, well, not much. The offense is, as expected, markedly more potent with Towns’ otherworldly skills and Bridges up-and-down performance not hiding his three-point touch or midrange skills. The defense took a hit but has stabilized as a middle-of-the-pack unit. The 26-15 record might be even better than expected as the starting five has logged more games together than any group in the NBA.

But there are still those nagging questions and maybe less certainty of the answers.

“We’re losing games I feel like we shouldn’t be losing,” Josh Hart said. “So we’ve got to figure it out. We’re halfway into the season at this point. Nothing we can do about the first half now. We’ve got to focus on the second. But if we want to be the team we want to be at the end of the year we got to start correcting these.”

What exactly are the correctable parts of this?

“We’ll talk about it in the locker room and figure it out in terms of stuff,” Hart said. “Energy and execution.”

"We’ve gotten better from where we’ve come, but it's still a long way to go,” Jalen Brunson said. “Continue to have the mindset of getting better every day. It’s the same, no matter what game it is. It could be Game 82. Our mindset is just to better.”

Brunson’s words are in line with what the Knicks have said since the day the pieces were set in place. Get better every day. Be at your best in the postseason. But the words that have also accompanied those mantras throughout these first months together are more troubling — energy, effort, agendas. Should it take this long to become the sort of team in those areas that they were before?

“I think we're better than we were when we started,” Thibodeau said. “The first month of the season, second month, better, and then there's a long way to go. That's why I think from a mentality standpoint of focusing on daily improvement with the understanding that you want to be playing the best at the end.

“There's a lot of challenges throughout the course of the season, so there's ups and downs, and you have to handle that. You've got to get through things together, but you never can lose sight of how important it is to improve every day, and then hopefully at the end you're playing your best basketball. There's still a lot of things that we can do better that we have to lock into.”

The thing about this experiment is that it was all-in, creating a starting five as talented as any in the league. But as one team official said in an off-the-record talk: "You can always make a deal, there is always a way."

So is this the final roster? Or will the team find a way to add to the depth? Is Mitchell Robinson returning to the active roster or bound for another deal?

There are 41 more regular-season games starting in Philadelphia on Wednesday to see if the mantra of being at their best by game 82 is real or just an illusion the team has held up. And the reality is that it’s not about the last game of the regular season, but about how far they can get in the postseason. They didn’t go all-in in to see the season end where it has the last two seasons.

By Steve Popper

[email protected]@StevePopper

Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.