Knicks’ confidence remains high after tough loss to Oklahoma City

The question was a simple one and it was posed not by the hordes of media with cameras and recorders in front of the players, but by the players themselves.

In the locker room after the embarrassing 126-101 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder Friday night, the rest of the team was already gone and Mikal Bridges was the last one still in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, dressing slowly and considering the obvious.

“When times get tough,” Bridges said, “Who are we going to be?”

The question didn’t come out of thin air. It’s one that the fans and media have been asking, maybe since the trades that brought Bridges and Karl-Anthony Towns to the Knicks and certainly as the season has gone on, now inching close to the halfway mark. After Sunday and Monday’s back-to-back set with Milwaukee and Detroit, the Knicks will have hit 41 games and as the saying goes, it’s getting late early.

What the Knicks have shown so far is glimpses and hints of the team that they hope they can be. They can point to one-sided wins over Denver and Minnesota and a 25-14 record. And they’ve also shown that there is something unknown, unproven. The Knicks are 0-5 against the four top teams in the NBA and four of those losses have been by at least 10 points.

To be what they want to be, to move past the Eastern Conference semifinals where the last two seasons ended, they have to be able to show they can beat top teams and nothing anyone saw Friday night would lend confidence to that notion.

“Yeah, I think we do,” Josh Hart said when asked if he believed the Knicks can be one of those top teams. “I think at the end of the day we have to go out there and execute at a high level.

“We have to go out there with energy. We have to go out there with no egos. We have to go out there with no individual agendas. We have to go out there and sacrifice. I think that’s the biggest thing. We’re a new group. We’re still learning, figuring it out. But we can’t expect to just have talent and go out there and win games. We’ve got to lock in and compete.

“I think we’re all confident in ourselves. At the end of the day we’ve got to continue to build, we’ve got to continue to grow and that has nothing to do with the opponent. I don’t care if it’s the Celtics, OKC or whoever’s struggling in the league, at the end of the day we’ve got to focus on what we can focus on. That’s the people in this locker room.

“We can’t focus on, ‘Oh, this one win is going to show us and show everyone else that we can contend.’ We don’t care what anyone else says. At the end of the day we’ve got to figure it out in this locker room.”

Jalen Brunson added, “Yes. I feel like we do have the talent to compete, but it’s not always talent . . . It’s all about just building every single day. Sometimes, you can do the right things and fail, and sometimes, you can do the wrong things and have success. [Friday] we did the wrong things and failed, so that’s the difference. But every single day, we just got to keep building, keep chipping away. Just not lose faith, not lose confidence.”

Nights like Friday undermine the confidence and bring up questions of agendas. And the Knicks have yet to show that there is a counter argument.

“It’s a long season,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “The idea to be playing your best at the end. There’s going to be bumps in the road. How do we get through those things. Are we mentally tough when we face adversity? And can we grow?

“That’s where the focus has to be on growing and getting better. … You can take a snippet out of any season and say this is what it is and then you can wait to the end to know what it is. So is it bad? Is it good? It could be better. Do we want it to be better? Yeah. The reality is this is where our record is, we’re third in the East, we’d like to be first.”

Help wanted

The Knicks have been under scrutiny for the lack of depth and the minutes crush on the starting five this season. And some of it is due to injuries that have left them without Michell Robinson all season long and without Deuce McBride for five straight games before Friday. Add in the absence of Landry Shamet until the last 10 games and an earlier injury to Precious Achiuwa.

But some of the blame also goes to the bench beyond those veterans and league sources have indicated that at the highest reaches of the franchise there is a bit of panic and finger-pointing going on. The Knicks have three rookies on the roster who have made little impact and even with a deep roster of player development coaches on the NBA team there has been an eye toward the Westchester Knicks.C

Desagana Diop recently became the first coach to ever win back-to-back titles in the G League Winter Showcase. But a league source indicated that the Knicks have been searching for a player development-focused coach to head the program, reaching out for permission to speak with candidates — putting the onus on speeding the learning curve for the young players on the NBA roster.

Broken Bridges

It seemed as if the worries about Bridges shooting were buried with nights like the 41-piont effort on Christmas Day. That game actually capped an 11-game stretch in which he shot 57.7% from the field and 46.9% from three. But in the nine games since he’s dropped to 45.1% overall and 21% from three. And in the last four games he’s a combined 3-for-30 from beyond the arc — including his 0-for-7 from three in a scoreless Friday night against OKC.

“Just got to make them,” he said. “I think I’ve been short on a lot of them these last couple of games. Just got to put a little more lift on them. Been short on almost all of them. Just put more legs in it.”