Everyone's yapping about Mike D'Antoni today, but what really piques my interest is the test that's about to face our young Knicks. As Brett Cyrgalis mentions in his article in The Post, tonight's match-up with Phoenix kicks off a lengthy Western road trip. Toney Douglas and Danilo Gallinari have shone of late, but in the final month of a lost season, bringing the energy to five cities in ten days could be a tall order.
"It's a real challenge," Douglas said of keeping up the intensity during this upcoming five-game road trip, which after Phoenix heads to Utah, Portland, Golden State, and then the Clippers. "It's time to show what I'm made of. I feel like I'm ready and I need to continue doing what I'm doing."
With the Knicks still badly short-handed, both Gallo and Toney will be asked to shoulder a great deal of the burden and put a lot of minutes on those young supple legs. It'll be a test of the squad's collective mettle. Toney certainly sounds up to the task, but we'll have a better sense of how far the young guns have come in a week or two. Here's what we have to look forward to:
It'll test our mettle as fans, too, with games at all sorts of odd hours. Things kick off tonight at 10:00 in the lovely city of Phoenix.