The Knicks Fix

It’s cold and rainy here, miserable. But it might be more miserable for the home team. The Knicks have had a day of rest between games – I’m sure none of them made the trek over to Windsor and instead were tucked into their luxurious hotel beds by curfew – while the Pistons got home sometime around 4 a.m. after their game in Miami. So which team should have legs tonight? Gotta love the NBA schedule. Should the Pistons have their seven-game winning streak snapped, you can call it a schedule loss.

For the Knicks, it’s a golden opportunity afforded by a schedule that looked to be against them for most of the first month of the season. They could take a 6-5 record, a winning record, on the road. Anything associated with winning right now is something for the Knicks to grab hold of.

But the NBA schedule really isn’t good for anyone.

Billy Hunter, the player’s union leader, will take time out to make trifled comments about the Ben Wallace headband controversy and also put up a useless front in speaking out against the stricter enforcement of technical fouls for acting out. But what does he have to say about a schedule that includes an overabundance of back-to-back games that have teams barnstorming the country right out of the gate?

The Knicks schedule was brutal in November, with five straight back-to-back games on Friday and Saturday. Four were road-and-home scenarios. The only other was consecutive road games in Houston and San Antonio, which isn’t a far trip but certainly is a daunting 1-2 punch.

Next week, the Knicks get their first Friday off since Oct. 20. Next Thursday and Friday will be the first consecutive days the Knicks are off at home without travel. But after that weekend, the Knicks are back at it with Friday-Saturday back-to-backs the following two weekends into Christmas. Overall, the Knicks will play 20 back-to-back games this season. Eleven of them come on a Friday-Saturday.

But they’re not the only ones. The Pistons will play a league-high 22 back-to-backs this season, which is the same amount as last season. Only seven will come on Friday-Saturday. And, I understand that every year the circus in Chicago knocks the Bulls on the road for two weeks in November, but that’s an isolated situation.

If Hunter wants to take up a cause, why not take on this insane compacted schedule? The NBA plays the same around of games (82) as the NHL, yet starts an entire month later than the NHL and finished just a week after the NHL season ends. It has to have an effect on the quality of the games, which people pay a lot of money to watch. Either cut the number of games, or start the season in October.

Then again, most players would probably have more games and fewer practices. But if you asked coaches what would be better for the players and the quality of the games, it would be more practice time, more rest time.

Save the wild scheduling for the playoffs, when you want back-to-backs to keep momentum going.

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Thank you, Kobe, for proving my point in my previous blog. That third quarter against Utah was entertainment. I’m not a big fan of the NBA game because it’s often boring, predictable and generally not worth watching until the fourth quarter. But Kobe had me watching the late game on TNT last night because he had something special going.

Now that was something to ‘Witness’.