Knicks Insider Hints at Locker Room Issues

Josh Hart offered some tough love in the wake of recent New York Knicks defeats.

After the Knicks put up a pair of inconsistent performances, part of a streak that has seen New York drop five of its last seven, Hart called for his fellow Manhattanites to drop their "individual agendas."

Hart used the term twice after losses to Orlando and Oklahoma City that marred a recent five-game homestand at Madison Square Garden and SNY Knicks insider Ian Begley remarked that it left something of an impact as the team tries to make things right.

"I talked to a few people in the aftermath of it. Some people internally don’t think he was just throwing out cliches,” Begley said on his SNY web series "The Putback."It should raise some eyebrows. The group doesn’t feel like a singular unit yet. There are still things to clean up from the team cohesion standpoint. Is it fair to expect that to come in 41 games? I don’t know by Josh saying what he said, I think it raises eyebrows.”

Begley did not speculate who, if anyone, Hart may have been referring to but he felt "very comfortable saying it was not Jalen Brunson," his close friend and podcast co-host.

Even if there's no singular guilty party, it's easy to see where Hart is coming from: in the losses against Orlando and Oklahoma City, the Knicks set single-game season lows in assists at 16 and 18 respectively. New York had a minus-4 margin on the boards in those games and notably lost 15 turnovers in the loss to OKC.

Since then, the Knicks earned their most one-sided win of the season, a 140-106 demolition of the Milwaukee Bucks, before falling back in the loss column with a narrow defeat to the Detroit Pistons just over 24 hours later.

New York has done well with so many new, high-profile pieces: it's on pace for a 52-win season and they shouldn't have to worry about the Eastern Conference's Play-In Tournament. But that, Hart seems to imply, makes the supposed focus on individual agendas so frustrating, especially as the team tries to get over the second-round hump come playoff time.

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