BREAKING: The Knicks stink at defense!

Carmelo Anthony has helped the Knicks' defense go from bad to atrocious. (AP)

Those who expected the Knicks to morph into serious contenders after acquiring Carmelo Anthony — and these people exist, believe me — were nuts, and their euphoria over the team’s ability to land a scoring star in a decent trade temporarily made them forget that defense is kind of important. And Carmelo Anthony, for all his gifts, is a below-average defensive player who has never shown much interest on that end, outside of the occasional defensive rebounding binge. And so we should not be surprised that the Knicks, a bad defensive team before the trade, have remained a bad defensive team since the trade.

What should be more disturbing to Knicks fans, though, is that their team has been significantly worse on defense since the trade despite playing a scheduled loaded with bad offensive teams. The worst defensive team in the league (Cleveland) allows 110 points per 100 possessions, according to Hoopdata’s formula. Since the trade, the Knicks have permitted more than 110 points per 100 possessions in six of 12 games, including five of their last seven. In a weird twist that could be read as a good sign, New York has actually played some of its “best” post-trade defense against a couple of the good-to-elite offensive teams it has faced; the Knicks held both the Hawks and the Heat to very low point totals.

But the overall picture is one of absolutely horrid defense, and it should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the league over the last half-decade. The more interesting issue is where exactly the Knicks have gone so wrong defensively since the trade. It’s not the stuff you might expect at first.

The Knicks have actually been a bit better at defending the rim since the trade, at least in terms of their opponents’ shooting percentage on close shots and the number of such shots New York has allowed per game. Teams have hit 38.6 percent of their three-pointers against the Anthony Knicks, and while that’s bad, New York opponents shot about 37 percent from deep before he arrived. The Knicks’ defensive rebounding rate has remained as bad as it was before the trade but it has not gotten significantly worse.

That leaves us with two things:

1) The Knicks are fouling like crazy.

Opponents have attempted nearly 30 free throws per game since the trade, up from 25.9  in the Knicks’ first 54 games (without ‘Melo). And the jump is not the product of pace, either; New York is averaging about the same number of possessions as it was before the deal.

Post-deal, the Knicks have yielded about .370 free throws per shot attempt. That beats Utah’s league-worst mark by a wide margin, and if you’re allowing more foul shots than the always foul-prone Jazz, you have a problem. Anthony alone is committing about one more foul per 36 minutes with the Knicks, but that’s not nearly enough to explain the entire jump, obviously. This is a team-wide thing. Over the full season, New York is only the ninth-worst team in free throws allowed per shot attempt, and it was about average before the trade.

Getting to the line more than its opponents was a key factor in New York’s improved scoring this season. If it loses the few points it gained at the line each game (on average), it’ll have to find them elsewhere. And while Anthony is an ace at drawing fouls, there’s no way New York can earn enough free-throw attempts in the long run to make up for a foul rate like this.

2) The Knicks are getting smoked from mid-range.

Since the deal, opponents have hit 45.5 percent of their long two-point shots, according to Hoopdata. The league average on those shots is about 39 percent, and no team has allowed a mark higher than 43 percent over the full season. New York’s opponents shot 41.5 percent from this range before the Carmelo deal, so the Knicks were shaky at defending these shots already.

On shorter shots — but not dunks or layups — teams have hit about 40 percent against the ‘Melo Knicks; before the trade, New York held opponents to 36.9 percent on shots taken from 3-to-15 feet.

There are lots of ways to look at this data. The Knicks have probably run into an unlucky opponent hot streak on long two-pointers; the Pacers, an awful mid-range-shooting club, just finished knocking down 26-of-48 long twos (54.2 percent) in consecutive wins over New York. That is fluky, and it will correct itself to some degree. But broken defenses tend to have holes everywhere, and we shouldn’t expect New York to be able to completely plug this hole.

The uptick on closer-range shots — those floaters — can be read as either a blip on the radar for a team that has generally defended them well or a regression to the mean that was eventually going to bite New York after a strong run of guarding these looks. Or some combination of both.

These numbers will settle down somewhere closer to the mean, and where they settle won’t matter much, unless the Knicks keep fouling at such a high rate. No matter where these numbers end up, the 2010-11 Knicks are going to be a bad defensive team, and changing that in the future is a matter of personnel, coaching and commitment. If the Knicks want to develop into true contenders, this is a change they’ll have to make — and it’s a big one.