Things can't get much worse for 'desperate' Knicks -- but will they get better at the trade deadline?

Players-only meetings tend to be a last resort. Circumstances have to deteriorate to where you're largely out of options, and even then it tends to be the last lever because you really can't pull it more than once. 

They just don't usually happen during a game. In the second quarter. At home. Not sure I've seen a bench confab so public and raw as when Jalen Brunson gathered the troops during a timeout in the Knicks embarrassing loss to the Mavericks on Monday.

The body language there was not great. Whatever he said to his teammates was obviously urgent enough that he decided it couldn't wait. 

It didn't work. The Knicks got throttled at Madison Square Garden for their ninth loss in 11 games. It was bad enough that poor Spike Lee looked like he was headed off to therapy at the half.

It has been an ugly stretch for the Knicks, but losing at home to a banged-up Mavs team, especially when they got Brunson and Josh Hart back from injuries, is a new low this season. Dallas started Cooper Flagg, Dwight Powell, Caleb Martin, Naji Marshall and Max Christie. Christie alone went for a career-high six 3-pointers -- in the first half. He finished 8-for-10 on 3s. Yikes. That is unacceptable for the Knicks. So is whatever is going on with them right now. 

The vibes are so bad that Knicks fans booed them on Monday. The team and the head coach noticed -- and couldn't argue with it. Brunson said he'd boo them, too. 

"I'm OK with the boos," Mike Brown said after the latest loss. "If we're playing crappy, boo. If I was in the stands, I would boo, too. You pay hard money to come to the games and this is a form of entertainment for the fans. They know good basketball from bad basketball."

This recent run has unquestionably been the latter. Hart called it "inexcusable" and said they all need to do some "soul searching." They're maybe one more loss from burning sage in the locker room. 

Since winning the NBA Cup, the Knicks -- who are still favored to win the Eastern Conference (+360 at DraftKings) are 7-11. They've fallen seven games behind the East-leading Pistons and, perhaps more disheartening, they're a game-and-a-half back of the Celtics for second. The Knicks just had alumni weekend and welcomed a bunch of their former players back to MSG, only for the team to let the air out of the party balloons with a deflating loss to the Suns. Before that, they had a disastrous four-game road trip where they lost three times, including in Sacramento.

The main culprit for the recent collapse starts with the defense. It's been below average for much of the season -- and considerably worse than that lately. The Knicks are 18th in defensive rating, but over the last 15 games they're just 27th. 

The conundrum here is that their two best offensive players are two of their biggest liabilities on defense. Brunson was just named an All-Star starter and there's a case to be made that Karl-Anthony Towns should join him for the festivities in Los Angeles in mid-February even though he's having a dreadful shooting campaign. (His 52.5 eFG% would be the worst mark of his career.) But for all their offensive output, they tend to get hunted on the defensive end. It's hardly surprising that among the Knicks five most-used two-man combinations, Brunson and Towns have the worst defensive rating. OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges are two of the best and most versatile defenders in the league, and Mitchell Robinson is a top-flight rim protector, but there's only so much those three can do to paper over the deficiencies of the others. Even when the offense was humming early in the season and the Knicks were winning games, the defensive issues loomed in the background. Now they're in full view with a broken team trying to figure out how to piece itself back together on the fly.

This is the kind of slide that tends to make people panic. History isn't on the Knicks side here. That has to be worrisome for an organization that last season made its first Eastern Conference Finals in 25 years and came into this season with designs on going further and contending for a championship. Right now, things can't get much worse for the Knicks. But will they get any better?

Before the Mavs game, Brown talked about the Knicks being fully healthy and how he was excited to try some different lineup combinations that hadn't been used before. That didn't go the way he hoped, and it's unclear if just shuffling the cards already in their deck is going to result in the winning hand they're looking for. 

Maybe the Knicks shake things up before the trade deadline. Guerschon Yabusele would be the primary candidate to flip for new blood. The Knicks pried him away from the Sixers by giving him the tax-payer midlevel exception over the summer, but he hasn't won over Brown and is averaging fewer than 10 minutes per game. Maybe they dangle him along with some draft capital. They have the Wizards 2026 top-eight protected first-round pick, which obviously won't convey. But it does convert to two second rounders that could be useful. What they could get for that kind of package might not move the needle, but mixing things up has to be a better strategy than simply standing pat given how things are going. The Knicks no longer have the luxury of keeping the faith and sticking with their initial plan. 

"We have to play desperate," Hart said, "because that's what we are right now."