The Giants broke your spirit and the Jets broke your heart — or at least Tom Brady did, again — and so you figured perhaps the Knicks could salvage this first Sunday of the new year. They were playing shorthanded up north, against another sub-.500 team, and perhaps this would be the day they found something and started lifting the city like they did last year.
Julius Randle was out, and so was Kemba Walker, but then again, Randle had been a shadow of his former self and Walker had been banished after 20 games for a reason. The Knicks cannot win in Toronto, but hey, you never know when a season might turn as dramatically as it did last spring, when suddenly Tom Thibodeau’s team just couldn’t lose.
So maybe RJ Barrett’s homecoming would spark something inside of him, and turn him into the kind of leader Randle was in Thibodeau’s rookie Knicks season. Maybe Obi Toppin would take flight in his second career start, or…