Schedule not only challenge for Knicks in this key stretch

You don’t settle anything in December, no matter how many feel-good wins you can collect — and no matter how devastating the news of the day happens to be.

We are still very much in the preamble part of the NBA marathon, just 27 furlongs on the way to an 82-furlong race. Lots of basketball left. Lots of season left. You don’t define yourself in December.

But you can sure make a case for yourself.

The Knicks are making a case for themselves, despite receiving the gut-punch news Wednesday that Mitchell Robinson — already thought to be lost through the middle of February — will now be home for the rest of the season. They capped a five-game road trip Wednesday night in Brooklyn, walking into Barclays Center and stomping the Nets 121-102, a game in which they led for the final 46 ½ minutes and sure looked like the more interested of the two city teams home after long treks west.

“We played with a lead,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “That was very important for us.”

They are now five games into the 11-game gauntlet to close out the year that promised all along to be the first real test of the team’s resolve. All five of those games have been away from Madison Square Garden; it’s been so long since the Knicks played a home game that it sometimes feels like that game happened at the old place, up on 50th Street. All five of those games have been without Robinson — as will the final 55, too.

They are 3-2 so far. Five games down, six games to go, all six against teams with winning records. The knock on the Knicks across the season’s first two months was that they could flex against bad teams and flop against the good ones. They beat the Suns in Phoenix. They beat the Lakers in LA. They beat the Nets in Brooklyn. They do this with a yawning hole in the middle where Robinson’s minutes and his defensive presence used to be.

And now the fun really begins.

“We had good energy from the start,” said Julius Randle, who extended to 12 games a burst of prosperity that is as good a stretch as he’s ever had as a Knick, scoring a game-high 26 points, adding seven rebounds and four assists. “And we let that carry us through.”

They’ll take a breather Thursday, sleep in their own beds for a change, practice Friday. Then Saturday this rugged stretch will officially take a step up in class. The Bucks will be waiting for them bright and early Saturday afternoon, and the teams will have a Garden rematch on Christmas Day.

And as good as the feelings have mostly been during this 16-11 jump to the season, the Bucks have been a reliable buzzkill both times the teams collided, both times during the In-Season Tournament, both times in Milwaukee. The first time, playing without RJ Barrett, the Knicks took a late lead before Dame Lillard drained a back-breaking 3 late.

The second time, with visions of Vegas dancing in the Knicks’ heads, the Bucks made them look like the JV, crushing them 146-122. The Knicks have shown this week that they can beat good teams; now they get to measure themselves against one of the best, one of the favorites to represent the East in the Finals.

It’s silly to put too much emphasis on games this early in the calendar. Still, it feels like a split, at the least, is imperative. At some point the Knicks need to prove — to the league, to the Bucks, to themselves — that they are much closer to the team that fought the Bucks to the 48th minute in November and even played them to a virtual first-half tie in the blowout two weeks ago — and not the pretenders who looked outmanned and outclassed at the end.

And, yes, they will be shorthanded, as they will be for the rest of the season. That will not exactly make Giannis Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez quake in their Nikes. But they also go in playing as well as they have all season, their defense somehow getting better even as they try to neutralize Robinson’s absence, with a nice burst of momentum. It’s clear that in six games without their starting center, they’ve begun to embrace their new normal. It will have to be more of the same.

“We can’t worry about other stuff,” Thibodeau said. “We want to be locked into whatever’s in front of us.”

It’s the Bucks who are in front of us (and then the Thunder and the Magic, the Pacers and the Timberwolves). The gauntlet still awaits, and Robinson won’t be a part of any of it. So far they have survived. So far they have leaned into every turn. So far they’ve done well. They need to keep doing well.