Kristian Winfield: Knicks' embarrassing loss to Rockets shouldn’t be a surprise

And that’s bad news, because the way this team is playing in the tail end of a season littered with championship expectations, home-court advantage at The World’s Most Famous Arena could easily be the deciding factor in a seven-game series with a trip to the NBA Finals — or the consequences associated with failing to reach the league’s biggest stage — hanging in the balance. The Knicks certainly could have used the Madison Square Garden crowd on Tuesday. In truth, the slow starts, the disjointed offense and the disconnected defense haven’t been Knicks miscues unique to road games this season.

It’s becoming increasingly clear with each passing game against high-level competition that this is exactly who these Knicks are. And who they are is 17 points worse than the Western Conference’s sixth-seeded Houston Rockets, who handed the Knicks their third loss in a row with a 111-94 victory on Tuesday. The Rockets are a team that lost its starting point guard (Fred VanVleet) at the start of the year while the Knicks brought back and built upon the exact same core that punched the franchise’s first ticket to the conference finals in the last quarter-century.

The Knicks have not lived up to expectations — not even close, not even with just three wins over their final six games to tie last season’s 51-win mark. These are not Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks. This is the Mike Brown remix.

And the remix, despite its high-highs, has been defined by its low-lows. And when the Knicks are low, they are a hot mess. In what’s become typical Knicks fashion, the team wearing orange and blue spotted the Rockets a 12-1 lead to start the game — 10 coming from Kevin Durant, who finished with 27 points on 10-of-18 shooting from the field.