Daily Report – 1/20/26
Rangers
The all-too-familiar Blueshirts returned to action in Anaheim yesterday, dropping the first game of a West Coast back-to-back to the Ducks, 5-3. Saturday’s win was a blip on the radar. Yesterday, the Rangers showed their true colors against former teammates Jacob Trouba and Chris Kreider. They surrendered multiple leads to Anaheim and have now dropped nine of their last 12 games.
Before the game, while Rangers media members were standing outside Anaheim’s locker room, they reported hearing circus music coming from inside. One Ducks reporter claimed Trouba was responsible.
Needless to say, the Rangers have been a clown show all season. Now, they are awaiting the start of a retool, which could involve the departure of many beloved players, including Artemi Panarin. His two points capped off his sixth 10-game point streak with the Rangers, the second most in franchise history. His 10-game assist streak is the longest of his career.
Go figure. Panarin is performing at his best right after being told the Rangers will not be offering him a contract extension.
Four minutes into the opening period, Matthew Robertson scored on a slap shot from the high slot that deflected off Lukas Dostal. Mason McTavish tied the game at the 11:31 mark, but Panarin regained the Rangers’ lead with a power-play goal four minutes into the second period. Captain JT Miller assisted on both Rangers’ goals.
“I thought it was an even game for the most part,” Miller said. “Both teams had good pushes. There were some mistakes, but I think from a systems standpoint, we’re trying to go in the right direction.”
Nobody has felt more responsibility for this disappointing season than Miller. He was pleased to register his eighth multi-point game of the season yesterday, but he is far from satisfied with the way his team performed.
“I think the guys are doing their very best to take a professional approach,” said head coach Mike Sullivan, who is doing all he can to keep his team composed after Chris Drury’s letter. “It’s been a tough couple of weeks here, most recently. I do think that these guys take a lot of pride in what they do, and they care a lot.”
Although Robertson managed to score his third goal of the season at the start of the first period, he was responsible for McTavish’s equalizer. After the puck deflected off Robertson’s skate in front of the Rangers’ net, where Spencer Martin was making his second consecutive start, it landed right in front of McTavish, who scored easily.
“I thought we had a real good start,” Sullivan remarked. “I thought we were skating in the first period. I don’t think we sustained it to the level that we needed to, in particular on five-on-five.”
By the end of regulation, the Rangers had converted on two of their four power play opportunities, including a goal by Vladislav Gavrikov seven minutes into the third period. 62 seconds into the final frame, Cutter Gauthier made it 4-2 Anaheim, but the Rangers managed to respond. Partially, at least.
25 seconds after Gavrikov’s goal, Robertson went to the penalty box for holding McTavish. Although the Rangers were able to kill the penalty successfully, it killed their momentum. It was not the first time this season that Robertson took a penalty less than a minute after his team scored.
New York went back on the power play with 5:50 remaining in regulation, and they even earned 21 seconds of five-on-three time. JT Miller hit the crossbar on the two-man advantage, and that was all the Rangers could generate offensively on their final power play.
After both penalties expired, the Rangers emptied their net, but on his 22nd birthday, Gauthier lit the lamp for the second time in 20 minutes.
“One of the simplest, easiest ways to beat yourself is to not manage the puck appropriately,” said Sullivan. “If you do, you give teams opportunities to create easy offense, and I think, in a few of the events of tonight, we beat ourselves because we didn’t take care of the puck.”
The Rangers hope to manage their pucks better tonight when they visit the Los Angeles Kings (10 PM, 9 PM CT – MSG, Gotham Sports).
Knicks
This has to be rock bottom for the Knicks. It has to be, because if they get any worse, the ticking time bomb, Madison Square Garden, will explode.
Boos. That was all the Knicks have been hearing for weeks. Two duds in one weekend, in which they scored fewer than 100 points at home, did not help. In any other season in the Jalen Brunson era, the Knicks would be fighting flesh and bone for their lives. This year, with nine losses in their past 11 games, they seem perfectly content with sucking.
There is nothing scarier than feeling satisfied with not being good enough.
Yesterday, a healthy squad of Knickerbockers allowed the shorthanded Dallas Mavericks to invade their building and emerge with a 114-97 win. The Knicks exhibited an inexplicably low level of effort on both sides of the basketball. They laid their plumpest egg of the season.
When the Knicks won the NBA Cup on December 16, Brunson was the first to say it wasn’t enough. The Knicks became the first team ever to refuse to hang a banner after winning the NBA’s in-season tournament. Now, they no longer seem to want to win that once-coveted championship, let alone a single game.
The only question is how.
How did the Knicks go from winning the NBA Cup and looking like the best team in the NBA to a 7-11 stretch with the second-worst defensive rating in January that put them 1.5 games above the Play-In Tournament?
“Guys are gonna be banged up, guys aren’t gonna be 100%,” Josh Hart said after last night’s loss. “But the effort, I think, last year, no matter what we did, was there. I haven’t seen this kind of effort that we had today. It was embarrassing.”
There it is. There it is.
If Josh Hart, the Knicks’ chief glue guy, doesn’t think his team is exhibiting enough effort, then, well, at least he admitted the obvious. But remember, this season was supposed to be the most anticipated for the Knicks in over three decades, so we must think deeper. We must examine beyond “What’s it going to take to get the Knicks going?”
We must ask ourselves, “Why can’t the Knicks show more effort?”
I
don’t
know.
I try to answer every question about this team because typically, every question has an answer. For instance, “Can the Knicks still contend for a championship?” Not unless their 18th-ranked defense improves to at least 15th overall. But effort is another issue, and it’s easy to tie it back to locker room culture.
Under Tom Thibodeau, the Knicks were scrappy. Under Mike Brown, the Knicks are spoiled. Brown is the coach who carries the weight of expectations. Thibodeau was the coach who made expectations possible. In other words, under Thibodeau, the Knicks still had something to prove. Under Brown, they feel like they already have.
But they haven’t proven anything yet, and the players have expressed that before. They have recognized that this season requires a championship-or-bust mentality. But Brown doesn’t always seem to understand that.
So maybe Brown is the problem. Not Karl-Anthony Towns. Not Jalen Brunson. Not Mikal Bridges.
Mike Brown.
The bottom line is that the Knicks had to move on from Thibodeau because it didn’t feel like he could take them to the next level. However, he was fired on a whim.
Think about it: Brown wasn’t the Knicks’ first choice to replace Thibodeau. Jason Kidd was. And then a few other guys who weren’t available either. Brown was fourth or fifth on the Knicks’ wish list.
At first, the players didn’t seem to mind their team’s decision to fire Thibodeau. Well, was it Leon Rose or James Dolan who made the decision? It’s still unclear, but perhaps it wasn’t a coincidence that Dolan didn’t return to his seat after the first half yesterday.
Anyway, the players, led by Brunson, initially bought into Brown’s style of play. He was going to set a new standard that revolved around their pace of play, and the Knicks were going to achieve a higher caliber of defense. It was an exciting proposition.
But recently, the Knicks have slacked off post-NBA Cup, and they have stopped embracing Brown’s style of play. Now, they sit around on the court. They don’t run.
The Knicks’ lack of effort is affecting every aspect of their game. They are missing more shots and draining fewer threes, plus they have ceased their mission to excel at the most challenging area of basketball: Defense. Defending is difficult enough already. It is even harder to learn how to defend under a new coach’s system. So, the Knicks must contribute even more effort to achieve Brown’s desired level of defense.
But in reality, the Knicks aren’t contributing the effort necessary to improve defensively. In fact, they seem to have bought out of, not into, Brown’s system. According to Fred Katz, the Knicks have allowed the second-most points per possession in the league since they won the NBA Cup. Thibodeau would not have stood for that. He would have told his team to fight their instincts and maintain the same level of fight until the bitter end.
It might be subconscious, and the players might not be willing to admit it, but the Knicks have become cocky. Not cocky in the sense of Towns trading kicks to the nuts with Dwight Powell. More like cocky in that their hubris is showing.
And Mike Brown is not doing anything about it.
Schedule
9:00 PM (8:00 PM CST): Yankees Hot Stove; YES, Gotham Sports
9:00 PM (8:00 PM CST): 2026 Australian Open – Men’s and Women’s Second Round; ESPN2, ESPN App
10:00 PM (9:00 PM CST): NYR at LAK; MSG, Gotham Sports
