BOSTON — Close your eyes and imagine basketball perfection. Think about it. Really picture it.

OK, now open.

Surely, whatever you envisioned might have looked something like what the Knicks did in the opening minutes of Tuesday’s game against the Boston Celtics. Each pass was humming with purpose and precision. Each shot was exact to the millimeter. Boston couldn’t dribble without a New York defender beating it to a spot. Each shot the Celtics put up was contested.

Perfection.

OK, now close your eyes and imagine the worst basketball that can be played. Think about. Really picture it.

Open.

Whatever you thought of probably looked exactly like what the Knicks did for 1 1/2 quarters in Tuesday’s 123-117 loss.

“We can’t get bored with what’s working,” Josh Hart said.

final from boston. back home tomorrow. pic.twitter.com/CCAIeGfDae

— NEW YORK KNICKS (@nyknicks) December 3, 2025

The defeat to the Celtics wasn’t New York’s worst loss of the season. It almost was until Mikal Bridges went nuclear in the fourth quarter to help bring an 18-point deficit down to just a few points. It was, however, the Knicks’ most bizarre defeat.

No team plays perfectly for 48 minutes. It’s the NBA. Teams and players are too good. There will always be a run. With that said, very few teams go from playing with the flawlessness that New York did for almost an entire quarter to a level of decay that rivals the worst teams in the Eastern Conference.

The tide turned halfway through the second, with the Knicks leading Boston by six. New York had spent the bulk of the game to that point spraying the ball around the court, making good decisions and playing with an energetic offense. Then, Karl-Anthony Towns grew frustrated with the Celtics defenders guarding him closely, the referees for not calling fouls or both. The big man who got out to such a great start had turned the game into a personal one.

With 6:54 left before halftime, Towns was backing down Boston’s Jaylen Brown when Celtics guard Hugo González stepped down to double-team, leaving Hart wide open for 3. At this point, Hart hadn’t missed from deep — he was 3-for-3. Towns tried to force his way through two defenders. He lost the ball. Hart stood close by, his hands out, wondering why he wasn’t putting up a shot.

The vibes changed from that point.

“At the end of the game, we had 17 free throws, and they had 14,” Knicks head coach Mike Brown said. “We went to the free-throw line more than they did. One of the things we pride ourselves on is to try and be a ‘no excuse’ team. I thought tonight we were all on the officials a little too much. That was big.

“A post-up is a paint touch, and a drive is a paint touch. If anyone draws two (defenders) … they got to spray it. I thought through the first quarter we did a good job of spraying the basketball. I think we had seven sprays in one quarter, which we lead the league in. … We didn’t do a great job in that second quarter of touching the paint and spraying it, and (Towns) was one of the few guys that didn’t do that.”

Before Tuesday’s loss, New York had won four straight games, largely because of its defense. Players spent the past few days talking about how the on-ball defense has turned a corner, how the communication is improving. And early on, those beliefs continued to reveal themselves. Yet, as soon as the offense began to be stagnant, the defense cratered, too.

The Celtics erased a first-quarter 14-point deficit while shooting just 28 percent from 3. Boston converted on 80 percent of its 2-pointers through the first three quarters. Eighty percent. Ochenta.

“We weren’t guarding the ball well, but, also, secondary help,” Bridges said. “Obviously, we have to guard the ball well. But there was no help the helper. We can’t do that to a really good team. It felt like we were leaving guys on an island, and guys can get blown by — there was no stepping over and making them kick it out.”

Through all of that, Knicks star guard Jalen Brunson had his worst game of the season — and maybe his worst game in New York. He hit just 6 of 21 shots from the field with three turnovers, some late and costly. It happens. No one is perfect. But don’t tell Brunson that.

“I didn’t do my team any service,” Brunson said. “It’s unfortunate.”

Brown had his struggles from the sideline, too. He played Brunson and Tyler Kolek, two of New York’s smallest players, together for a significant stretch. There were even stretches of those two with Jordan Clarkson. The Knicks got outscored significantly in those minutes.

“I was searching,” Brown said. “I also thought we got a little stagnant offensively.”

The bizarre nature of the game didn’t stop there. There’s something about the Knicks in TD Garden that makes them feel invincible. Despite being down by 18 to start the fourth, with no momentum at all, New York, just as it did in the last playoffs, erased the Celtics’ large lead like it was nothing. Bridges couldn’t miss. Towns was finishing through contact. The defensive intensity was far more prevalent than it had been for the previous 24 minutes. The Knicks got their deficit down to four multiple times within the final six minutes. Boston, though, gave New York a dose of its own medicine, with backbreaking offensive rebounds that allowed the Celtics to maintain a lead and finish the game.

To start and to finish, the Knicks looked like a team that had turned the corner in establishing its dominance in the East. In the middle quarters, though, New York was a team that circled back around the block like it had forgotten something.

The Knicks haven’t accomplished enough to be bored with perfection, to have a drop-off in quality to that extreme and assume it can turn it on when it needs to. What happened Tuesday was unacceptable only because they knew what it would take to win. They had done it for an entire quarter. Then they just stopped.

New York’s ambiguous season got even more confusing in Boston.

“We have to make sure we’re locked in on making sure the success of the team is the No. 1 objective,” Hart said.