New York Knicks: Ranking the regular season games for October 2019
The New York Knicks have a handful of regular season games to play in late October when meaningful basketball starts. Which games hold the most importance?
The season has arrived for NBA basketball. It is the time for fans to re-embrace the three-point shooting, the tenacious blocks, the alley-oops and some of the game’s greatest stars. In one section of the country, it will welcome back the New York Knicks, eyeing recovery from a miserable 2018-19 NBA campaign.
The season, which starts on Wednesday, Oct. 23, and continues through April, will see the Knicks aim for their first playoff appearance since 2013 and try to escape the bottom of the Eastern Conference, which was a black hole for teams like the Cleveland Cavaliers, Chicago Bulls and Atlanta Hawks.
October is the shortest month of the NBA season since the games do not start until the final two weeks. The preseason technically fills it up, but that contains meaningless games towards the official win-loss record.
The Knicks have five games to play in nine days to close the 10th month of 2019. How do these matchups stack against each other in importance? Let’s take a look:
5. Oct. 30 at Orlando Magic
No rivalry exists between the New York Knicks and the Orlando Magic, who snuck into the 2019 postseason and lost to the Toronto Raptors. However, the orange and blue struggled at times against head coach Steve Clifford’s team, including a 115-89 blowout loss and 131 points allowed in two November 2018 games.
Orlando’s length can provide any team problems, given the presence of Aaron Gordon, Nikola Vucevic, Jonathan Isaac and others. The Knicks have their own big players to counter that this time, as Mitchell Robinson is one year into his development, and they signed a glut of forwards in the offseason.
With how young these teams are, this could be a more intriguing game in 2019-20. Its importance towards the schedule is low, though, and not an anticipated matchup. There is no bad blood between these teams, and they do not play in the same division in the Eastern Conference.
Especially with how early in the season this is, it means little for either team’s long-term goals. Game No. 5 will not make or break New York’s year, but they also cannot enter this pre-Halloween clash at 0-4, either.