It’s been this bad for weeks now. At the time they won the NBA Cup, the Knicks were 18-7 with the NBA’s No. 2 offense, No. 13 defense and No. 3 net rating. Since the Cup win, though, they’re now 5-6, including four of their eight double-digit defeats on the season. In this span, they’ve plummeted down to 17th on offense and 27th on defense, getting outscored by a downright Wizardian 5.6 points per 100 possessions — and if there’s one thing we know, it’s that you never want to be downright Wizardian.

Not if you fancy yourself a title contender, anyway, which the Knicks very much do — an assessment made abundantly clear on Monday by none other than Knicks owner James L. Dolan, who, during a rare interview on New York radio station WFAN, laid out his expectation that his team would make the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. (Which, for the record, was right before Dolan took the franchise’s reins from his father. Y’know, in case you were wondering.)

“We want to get to The Finals, and we should win The Finals,” Dolan said. “This is sports […] anything can happen in sports. But getting to the Finals, we absolutely gotta do. Winning the Finals, we should win.”

After four straight losses punctuated by the most lopsided blowout defeat of their season, the Knicks feel awfully far away from that sort of rarefied air — and from the confidence, overflowing mere weeks ago, that they could get there. The question facing Mike Brown and his staff: How do they get that back?

Well, some reinforcements couldn’t hurt. The Knicks have gone 2-4 since losing Josh Hart, who was off to arguably the best start of his career, to a sprained right ankle on Christmas Day, and have been without reserve guard Landry Shamet (right shoulder sprain) since before Thanksgiving. Both could return to the fold by the end of the week, according to SNY’s Ian Begley, and both could provide welcome infusions in areas that have ailed the Knicks.

Hart gives head coach Mike Brown another dogged perimeter defender to ease the burdens on OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges — and to help insulate the vulnerable Brunson and Towns — while also offering a source of complementary ball-handling and playmaking, another physical rebounder for a team that’s been outrebounded in four of the last six games, and a jolt of grab-and-go offense in transition. Shamet, for his part, was shooting 42.4% from 3-point range before his injury while pairing with Deuce McBride as two of New York’s best point-of-attack defenders — a particular pain point for a Knicks team that’s given up blow-by after blow-by in recent weeks, a major factor in New York ranking 23rd in the NBA in the share of opponents’ shots that come at the rim over the last 11 games.

Brunson has been the culprit in plenty of those blow-bys. While opposing offenses, particularly those helmed by bigger and/or more athletic lead guards, have long hunted the smaller Brunson at the point of attack, the Knicks have largely come out ahead in the bargain by virtue of Brunson’s ability to consistently marshal an elite offense that dishes out at least as much punishment as it takes. But despite Brunson continuing to put up great numbers during New York’s post-Cup swoon — just under 30 points and six assists per game on 45/39/86 shooting splits — New York’s offense, on the whole, has dipped down below league-average over the past several weeks.

And while the offense has been markedly better in Brunson’s minutes than when he’s taken a seat, it’s still performed like a fringe-top-10 outfit with the captain on the ball rather than the league-best-caliber murderer’s row it was in his floor time earlier in the season. That’s not nearly effective enough to overcome the kind of defensive hemorrhaging that the Knicks have been suffering with him on the floor — and a level of slippage that feels like, if not regression, at least a bit of reversion to old habits. 

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Brunson’s usage rate, time of possession, seconds per touch and dribbles per touch are all up during this downturn fromwheretheywere earlier this season, and the Knicks are throwing about 16 fewer passes per game than they were earlier this season. Against the Pistons, Brunson ended 42.4% of the Knicks’ offensive possessions with a shot attempt, foul drawn or turnover — the kind of gargantuan usage that he’d begun to eschew during the Knicks’ hot start, and the kind of ball-dominant, isolation-heavy style of play from which Brown was brought in, in part, to steer New York’s offense away.

“We’re not getting off [the ball] like we were in the past,” Brown told reporters after the Detroit loss. “You’ve got to make quick decisions, and as soon as you feel another body come to you, you’ve got to get off it. And right now, we’re not doing it. We’re holding onto it too much, trying to force the issue too much. [...] You’ve got to play off two feet, you’ve got to spray the basketball, and you’ve got to rely on your teammates to make decisions once you do spray it.”

On one hand, it’s difficult to blame Brunson for taking it upon himself to shoulder a heavier offensive burden when few, if any, of his teammates seem up to the task of dribbling through defensive pressure without losing the ball or generating and making shots against tight coverage. On the other, it’s an approach that can kickstart a vicious cycle: stagnant possessions begetting misses and turnovers that give opponents the opportunity to attack in transition against a Knicks defense that isn’t set, increasing the likelihood that they score, forcing New York to take the ball out and bring it up the floor against a defense that is set in the half-court, leading to stagnant possessions that beget misses and turnovers, and so on, and so on.

(It can become a chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: Are Towns, Anunoby, Bridges, et al., struggling to catch a rhythm and make plays because they’re reduced to bystanders while Brunson’s trying to cook? Or is Brunson having to try to cook so much because they — most notably Towns, who has played well all-around this season, but has seen his touches and offensive production dip as he adjusts to a new system under Brown — are struggling to catch a rhythm and make plays?)

Those cycles can turn virtuous, too. More intentional attacking, quicker decisions and better ball/body movement can lead to better, more open shots (and, if defenders are scrambling and out of position, more offensive rebounding opportunities). Make those, and you get the chance to set your defense more often, giving you a better shot of getting the kind of stops that give you the chance to run and hunt early offense. String enough of those sorts of sequences together, and you’re on the front foot, acting as the aggressor and knocking the opposition back on its heels — playing to the win-the-possession-battle identity that the Knicks, at their best, wield like a weapon.

The bad news is that the Knicks haven’t done much of that lately. The good news, Brown noted, is that they’ve done it before, and they’re capable of doing it again.

“It’s not time to panic,” Brown said Monday. “But we have to make sure we’re doing what we can do to help this group. And our guys have to bring it, or try to take it to another level as a group — not trying to do too much, but take it to another level as a group in a lot of areas.”