The tradition for teams who have just fired their coach is to play REALLY hard and win the next game. This happens all the time, even though teams that fire their coach midseason are almost invariably doing very poorly and are hardly able to win any game no matter how hard they play.
The Knicks, being the Knicks, failed to win this game against the Pacers, their first game since firing David Fizdale. But, I will say, they came really close to not losing. Way closer than you would expect from a team with the worst record in the league. They were a Julius Randle free throw away from sending the game into overtime, an overtime they could’ve possibly won.
I say that because the Pacers, in the final 5 minutes (coincidentally the length of an overtime period) of regulation, hit exactly zero shots. None. The Knicks actually only hit one, a Marcus Morris jumper that you get to see in this video. If they had just gotten one more, this would’ve been a win outright. But it’s asking a lot for the Knicks to actually make a decent amount of shots during any given stretch of a basketball game. Just one or two per quarter is about all you can expect.