Toronto beat the Knicks 148-98 on Tuesday night. New York finished the preseason 0-4, lost the finale by 50, and Mike Brown declined to treat any of it as information. He was right.
“I really didn’t care about the score, especially with the group we had on the floor,” Brown said.
Look at the group. The Knicks started Jose Alvarado, Miles McBride, Mohamed Diawara, Bruce Brown and James Wiseman. Eight players were unavailable, per McBride, four regular starters among them, plus Landry Shamet, Andre Drummond and Jordan Clarkson. Mikal Bridges traveled with the team and did a pregame workout, then did not play.
The result followed from that. New York trailed by 20 after the first quarter, 28 early in the second and 38 at halftime. Toronto shot 57.3% from the field for the night.
What Brown actually cared about
He flagged two numbers from the first half: 15 second-chance points and 30 fast-break points for the Raptors. Then he said his team was not crashing the boards and was not pushing the pace back the other way.
Those are habits, not outcomes, and habits are the only thing a coach can grade when half his rotation is in street clothes. A team that lets you rebound and run will lose by 50 when it is shorthanded and by 12 when it is whole. Brown named the actual defect and ignored the scoreboard, which is the correct order of operations in mid-October.
Kawhi Leonard scored 21 points in 16 minutes in his return to Toronto. Scottie Barnes added 19 points with 6 rebounds, 4 assists and 2 steals, Collin Murray-Boyles had 19 and RJ Barrett 17. The Raptors had their rotation available. That was most of the gap.
The players said the same thing
McBride said he hated losing that way, then pointed to the eight absences and the fact that Toronto “had added a Hall of Famer,” and said the team had to move on. Pacome Dadiet gave the bench something real with 10 points in 18 minutes, which is close to the only individual takeaway worth filing.
That alignment matters more than it sounds. When a coach writes off a result and the locker room writes it off for the same reasons, nobody spends the next six days relitigating an exhibition loss in Toronto.
An 0-4 preseason is not a problem yet
Preseason records are noise. An 0-4 preseason built on eight absences is noise with a receipt attached. The regular season starts Oct. 20, and the Knicks have not had their actual rotation on the floor together at any point this month.
That is the thing to watch, not the 50. Availability is the open question in New York, and four exhibition losses with Alvarado and Wiseman in the starting lineup tell you nothing about a team whose best five have not shared a possession. Brown refused to pretend otherwise. A coach who will say “I didn’t care about the score” out loud after a 50-point loss is a coach who understands what the next six months actually ask of him.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.