You can have all the athletic ability in the world, and it won't make much difference if you're soft in the skull.
That's the message coach Jeff Van Gundy has been trying to get across to his physically talented but cognitively feeble New York Knicks."Unfortunately, the pattern is we are a mentally weak team," Van Gundy said Wednesday night after his team lost to the Utah Jazz, 98-90, at the Delta Center. "We're only good right now when it's easy to be good, when we're rested."
As evidence, consider that the defending Eastern Conference champs are 1-3 on the second night of back-to-back games this season. Their only victory came against that pitiful excuse for a team the Chicago Bulls are fielding these days.
The Knicks are still without injured center Patrick Ewing, and they have played a tough schedule -- the Jazz, for instance, have had just one back-to-back set so far -- but to his credit, Van Gundy declined to use those excuses.
"We're banged up, and the schedule has not been in our favor, but that happens to every team," he said. "If we're only going to be good on the nights it's easy to be good, it's going to be a long year."
Van Gundy complimented the Jazz for their consistency.
"Their best players are ready every night," he said. "If your best players are ready every night, it pulls everybody else with you."
Now, in some circles, describing a proud individual as "mentally weak" would be considered insulting at least, fighting words at worst. But the Knicks not only took Van Gundy's comments in stride, they agreed with him.
"He means we just need to get up for games like this," said Marcus Camby, the 6-11 stringbean who is filling in as starting center until Ewing returns. "It's been our downfall all year, not coming out ready to play. We just have to come out with more heart and effort."
"We weren't focused, and we weren't sharp," said guard Latrell Sprewell. "It's been that way all year. It wasn't one guy, it was a whole team thing."
Of course, it would have been hard for the Knicks to argue with their coach, considering the way they started Wednesday's game. They offered virtually no resistance for most of the first quarter, and the Jazz took advantage, hitting their first 10 shots from the field while racing to a 20-point lead. Van Gundy called three timeouts in the first six minutes, trying to get his team to wake up. They did, eventually, but it was too late.
"It's already to tough play here, but to dig yourself a hole and try to dig out of it is even tougher," said Camby.
What made the Jazz's opening outburst even less palatable was watching Utah center Olden Polynice -- never mistaken for an offensive force -- make four of four easy shots.
Knicks forward Larry Johnson said the game plan was to send Polynice, an atrocious free-throw shooter, to the line if he caught the ball in close. Instead, they watched him make dunks and layups.
"We were all looking at each other, wondering, 'What's the deal?' " Sprewell said. "We're better than that."
Knicks point guard Chris Childs is one of the guys who had a bad game. He didn't start, but when he did come in he went 0-for-5 from the field and took an elbow from John Stockton that put a cut over his right eye.
"Last year we ran teams, not the other way around," Childs said, shaking his head. "We're weak-minded as far as we give in to schedule, injuries, whatever. We need to do some soul-searching. We should come out and get after teams."