Magic 111, Knicks 102: “This is getting real”

The New York Knicks knew that it would be hard to repeat as NBA champions after they had the shortest summer out of all teams and spent weeks throwing parties in the “Big Apple” that would make the Great Gatsby turn pale with envy. On top of that, recent history, with nine different title winners in nine years, also told the Bockers that it would be almost impossible to win it a second time in a row. If they or you needed a reminder, here’s the 0-3 start for the defending champs. It’s not just talk anymore; it’s right in front of us in hard, cold numbers. Or as Keef suggested in the Postgame Thread: “This is getting real.”

How real remains to be determined, but right now it looks like nobody in Knick Nation wants to find out how bad this can get. Your beloved New York Ballers dragged themselves through another anemic, incomplete performance on Sunday night and granted the shorthanded Orlando Magic (playing without Paolo Banchero) their first win of the young season. It’s not like the Knicks didn’t try, starting with Jalen Brunson, who came out extremely aggressive and stayed that way throughout the entire contest. But 28 shots and 16 misses later, it turned out to be all for naught.

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Knicks searching for… what exactly?

It’s one of the captain’s many remarkable traits that he never shies away from a challenge and is willing to put the team on his back even in the darkest of times. Whether him shooting that much is the best way for the Knicks in a game like this can be debated, though, and has been plenty in the past, especially when his shot is as off as it certainly seems to be early in the year. Nobody wants Brunson to change because eventually we will get the Finals Game 5 version of him (damn, that was beautiful). Yet he himself knows that not even the new king of the city has found a solution for all that’s wrong with the team right now.

Against Orlando, it actually looked like the Knicks had finally grabbed the rope and started to pull themselves out of the mud with a 12-0 start in the first quarter. The gameplan of leaving the Magic wide open from downtown worked to perfection as one of the…

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Publish date : 2026-10-26 12:20:00

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