Knicks Agree Boos Warranted After ‘Abysmal’ Performance Leads to Fourth Straight Loss

Josh Hart said the Knicks are playing “embarrassing” basketball after their fourth consecutive loss. | Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images

The new year has not been kind to the Knicks.

New York, pegged as a favorite to come out of the East entering the season, owns a paltry 2-8 record since the calendar flipped to 2026. The Knicks’ most recent slide has been particularly concerning. After their defeat at the hands of the Mavericks at Madison Square Garden on Monday night, the orange and blue have lost four straight games. The offense looks disjointed and the defense uninspired. Karl Anthony-Towns has been particularly detrimental to the team’s winning efforts at times but these last few losses have been total team efforts and nobody should escape blame.

If anything, the fans appear to feel that way and let the team know it over the last two games. MSG was filled with thunderous boos when the Knicks fell to the Suns on Saturday and the boo birds emerged once more on Monday after New York went down by 20 in the first half. New York fans booing their team is not a novel experience, of course; just ask the Jets or the Giants. But after the last few years those fans appeared to have a bit of a soft spot in their hardened hearts for this Knicks roster led by the gritty Jalen Brunson. Such goodwill only goes so far, it would seem.

For the second straight night the Knicks hear loud boos from the MSG crowd. pic.twitter.com/EhWBDKCios

— KNICKS BEAST (@KnicksBeast) January 19, 2026

Players and coaches alike can sometimes get prickly about boos from the home crowd. Not the Knicks. Not last night, at least. Several of the franchise’s key figures acknowledged the boos were 100% warranted while speaking to media after the game.

“I”m O.K. with the boos,” coach Mike Brown said. “If we’re playing crappy, boo. If I was in the stands I’d probably boo, too. You pay hard money to come to the game. This is a form of entertainment to the fans. They know good basketball and they know bad basketball. We didn’t play good basketball in the first half. So I’m O.K. with the boos.”

Brown said pretty much the same thing after New York lost to Phoenix days prior, so he is remaining consistent: the fans have a right to let the team know how they feel when they aren’t playing up to standard.

Brunson and Towns both expressed similar thoughts to the media.

“I’d be booing us, too. Straight up,” said the All-NBA point guard.

“You spend $140 to represent your favorite player with a jersey,” Towns said. “You come to MLK Day here at The Garden and tickets are twice, three times the price. To come here and spend your hard-earned money, money you’ve saved up to bring your family to this game... I’d be disappointed too. The fans, they spend their hard-earned money. They give us so much love and motivation to go out there. They expect results and so do we. Fans are doing their part. We’ve got to do our part.”

The Knicks don’t need the fans to tell them they aren’t playing well, though. Josh Hart ripped his team after their fourth straight loss, calling their play both “embarrassing” and “abysmal.”

“We all need to do some soul-searching,” Hart bluntly stated. “Some looking in the mirror. Figuring out what we’re gonna do individually, what we’re gonna do as a team. Right now we’re playing embarrassing basketball. We’re not executing on the offensive end. Defensively, we've been abysmal. We've been terrible defensively all year. At some point we have to look in the mirror and realize that no one out here is feeling sorry for us. We have enough. We’ve shown that. Just have to figure out how to get that sense of urgency.”

Times are obviously tough in Manhattan but the Knicks remain in a solid enough spot. Even with their new year slide New York sits at fourth in the East entering Tuesday. It’s disappointing for the team to end up there after previously competing with the Pistons for the top seed but they haven’t tumbled out of the playoff picture entirely, either.

All parties, from fans to players to coaches, understand they are not playing good basketball of late. There’s time to figure it out—but urgency, as Hart notes, is required with how far they’ve fallen. How the Knicks come out against the Nets on Wednesday will be very indicative of the makeup of this roster.

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