It doesn’t matter how often you remind yourself of the baked-in challenges of the endless regular season, it’s still jarring when the train wanders off the tracks. It happens to every team — good or bad, contender or pretender, hopeful or hopeless. Teams go weeks at a time when it feels they can’t do anything wrong. It feels like it will last forever.
It never lasts forever.
Slumps happen. They happen to everyone. They happen in every sport. Ted Williams went 2-for-14 during one stretch of the 1941 season when he hit .406. That’s .143 on any calculator. The ’98 Yankees won 125 games between March and October, more than any baseball team ever assembled; they lost four in a row and six out of eight in August that year. Slumps are a scourge.
The Knicks are in a slump right now, a bad one, an extended one, and it comes at a most inopportune time. Monday night they take on the Pistons at Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena. The teams met in a tight, taut and highly entertaining six-game playoff series last year, and this year for most of the first third of the season they’ve been the clear Nos. 1 and 2 teams in the East.
