When Derrick Rose said “they’re saying us and Golden State are super teams” prior to the start of this season, his ambiguous use of the pronoun “they’re” didn’t encompass teammate Kristaps Porzingis (or probably anybody outside of the Rose household). Porzingis spoke with Marc Berman of the New York Post, and didn’t sound too shocked at how bad the Knicks have been:
“I think it was pretty easy to tell from the inside that we’re not that good of a team,’’ Porzingis said at the team hotel. “We can win games based on our talent, but it’s not going to last long. [We needed] more work, attention to details, to keep growing as a team. A good team needs time to play together. It was our first year of most of the guys playing together. It never happens like that [where] you trade a couple of players and you’re a championship contender. It’s understandable we weren’t going to win the championship, but I could tell we weren’t there yet.’’
…
“Of course, we all expected big things out of this year, but from the beginning it didn’t feel like — I felt we’d make big runs, but we weren’t there at that level where we wanted to be,’’ Porzingis said. “We can see now we’re not where we want it to be.’’
The 2016-17 Knicks have been a far cry from the super team that Rose was expecting; their 27-42 record has them at 12th in the East.