Knicks hit 3-point rough patch during brutal losing skid: Peaks and valleys

Cam Payne chucked and sank an otherwise meaningless 25-footer with eight seconds remaining Monday night, preventing the Knicks at least from tying the NBA-low this season for 3-pointers in one game.The Knicks finished their awful 103-94 home loss to the depleted Magic with just four conversions in 22 attempts from beyond the arc, continuing a recent icy patch from long range, especially during their first three-game losing streak of the season.“It’s an NBA season.There’s going to be peaks and valleys,” Josh Hart said after the game.

“There’s going to be games we shoot the lights out, going to be games where we can’t buy a shot.“We’ve got to make sure we are focused, we give off the right energy.We can’t have our own individual agendas.

We can’t do any of that.We’ve got to make sure we’re locked into this team, sacrifice for this team and go out there and play.”The Knicks still rank fifth in the NBA overall in 3-point efficiency at 37.9 percent for the season entering Wednesday’s game against the Raptors at the Garden.Nevertheless, since they sat in second place (at 39.8 percent) behind the league-best Cavaliers through Dec.

23, the Knicks mostly have been misfiring from long distance over their past eight games.They won the first five of those matchups as part of a nine-game surge, but they rank dead last in both 3-point attempts (30.6 per game) and 3-point efficiency (29.4 percent) over that span.The numbers are even worse during their three-game losing streak, with 28.0 attempts per game and a 25.0 percent conversion rate.“It’s a hard thing, I want to look at the 3s,” Tom Thibodeau said after Monday’s loss.“Some of them I felt were good [looks].

Some of them I felt there were hard close-outs and we’ve gotta read it better.So we can do better than we did tonight.

We’ll take a look at it.”One of Thibodeau’s stated points of emphasis for the Knicks this season was to increase their volume of 3-point shots to take a...