Knicks beat the Kings to connect first consecutive wins since April

The Knicks trailed by 15 points in the second quarter and by 14 in the third. Then hey did something unusual: forced a comeback, took the lead and held on to it until the final buzzer to upset the Kings, 103-101.

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A post shared by New York Knicks 🏀 (@nyknicks) on Dec 14, 2019 at 5:35am PST

Elfrid Payton, who finished the night with 16 points off the bench, scored 7 of them in the final act as he led his team’s comeback. Payton played flawless in crunch time after missing 17 games with an injury but Mike Miller already loves him.

“He hit big shots. Talk about a floor general — he was moving guys around, great job of clock management. He knew exactly where he wanted to go and kept us organized.”

– Mike Miller

Julius Randle scored a team high 26 points, with 17 of them coming in the first half,  and added 9 boards. Mitchell Robinson scored 14 and Marcus Morris had 10.

“It’s a good feeling. We just turned up our intensity and our aggressiveness. The bench did a great job coming in and playing well. We just kept fighting, locked into the details, and came out with a win.”

– Julius Randle

The Knicks haven’t connected two wins since the 81st game of the previous season. With Mike Miller taking over after the firing of David Fizdale one week ago, the Knicks have got their first consecutive wins of the season, for the third time in 2019. That’s right, during the whole year, New York were only successful in connecting two consecutive years, three times.

But these aren’t any kind of wins. Both of them (Warriors the other night and the Kings last night) were on the road. And because i like stats i wanted to see when did that last happen. Turns out, during the 2015/16 season the Knicks were able to win consecutive games on the road twice, in November (@Thunder & @Rockets) and in January (@Hawks & @Heat). Take that for data.