On Monday, during a rare win for the New York Knicks, against the Indiana Pacers, center Joakim Noah was fouled and stepped to the free-throw line. The lanky, sloppily ponytailed center took a few stiff dribbles and hoisted the ball toward the rim. Immediately, he—along with the rest of the arena—knew that things had gone wrong. As he screwed his face into blank confusion, then sharp terror, and finally sad resignation, the ball sailed crookedly to the left, eventually falling at least a foot short of the hoop. As awful as it was to watch, the botched attempt wasn’t a surprise. In a league of powerful, fleet-footed guards, increasingly dexterous big men, and thousands of improbably accurate three-pointers, Noah’s tortured set shot might be the ugliest recurring event. He stands slightly pigeon-toed and holds the ball as if hoping to squeeze out the air; at the point of release, he looks a bit like a volleyball player, setting up someone else’s big spike.

Noah’s mangled mechanics aside—although, to be clear, it’s bewildering that a professional basketball player should be so inept, and somehow getting worse, at the game’s core motion—the shot seemed like a metaphor for the Knicks’ entire season. I’m not the only one who thought so: in his great daily newsletter, Good Morning, It’s Basketball!, the hoops writer Tom Ziller introduced a clip of it as “THE KNICKS SEASON, IN ONE HORRIBLY AIRBALLED JOAKIM NOAH FREE THROW.” After a promising start—this is the separation from the fingertips, the lift into the air—things have quickly fallen away from coherence and out of control for my favorite team. (The other, more consequential analogy is too depressing, for the moment, to contemplate. The best imaginable slogan for this year’s Knicks: Things Are Worse in the Real World.) The team has lost seven of its past ten games, and now sits at eleventh place in the Eastern Conference, three games out of the playoffs.

Start at the top: despite making generally sound personnel decisions for the past several years, the Knicks’ general manager, Phil Jackson, has begun the inevitable process of wearing out his welcome, at least with the fans. In November, he gave a wide-ranging interview to ESPN’s Jackie McMullin and, for no discernible reason at all, blamed LeBron James for James’s not-so-amicable split with Pat Riley’s Miami Heat, along the way characterizing LeBron as an entitled brat and, worse, referring to James’s group of long-standing friends and business partners as a “posse.” In his position as, essentially, a high-class recruiter, Jackson not only insulted the game’s best player but did so in a way guaranteed to alienate his own players, as well as much of the rest of the predominantly black league.

Around the same time, Jackson subtly undermined his recently hired coach, Jeff Hornacek, by insisting publicly that the Knicks should run more of the Triangle Offense, which helped lead Jackson’s great Bulls and Lakers teams to championship victory. Hornacek’s halfhearted attempts to appease Jackson have led to a confused, sometimes listless offense, executed by players plainly unconvinced of the efficacy of their orders. It doesn’t help matters that Jackson’s current roster lacks the ingredients that have typically fuelled the Triangle—an unselfish point guard, a bona-fide superstar on the wing, a post-dominant center—or that the system’s merits, Phil’s mystical reverence notwithstanding, are doubtful at best in the new three-happy N.B.A. era.

Jackson has also managed to make a sullen constituent of the team’s closest thing to a veteran star, Carmelo Anthony. Jackson’s complaints about Melo are fair—Anthony does bring ball movement to a halt with his often gratuitous flurry of ball fakes and jab steps; he has lost some of the beguiling quickness that once made palatable his customary state of semi-fitness—but his decision to air them publicly has caused an unnecessary sideshow. After Charley Rosen, a friend of Jackson’s who helped write his book, “Maverick,” published a scathing column about Anthony, widely thought to reflect Jackson’s thinking, Jackson and Anthony hastily convened what sounded, from reports, like a tense meeting. There wasn’t, in the end, much to discuss: Anthony’s contract contains a no-trade clause, and he has no interest in leaving the bright lights of New York City. Just this week, it was reported that the Knicks recently proposed a trade with the Cleveland Cavaliers that would have sent Anthony to Cleveland for Kevin Love, who is having his best season in years. (The Cavs apparently declined.)

Then there’s Derrick Rose, who came to New York last off-season, alongside Noah. Rose entered the season under the cloud of a rape allegation by a former girlfriend. After he won the civil trial, he posed for pictures in the courthouse lobby, smiling widely, along with several starstruck jurors. Earlier this month, Rose was absent—with nary an explanation or hint of advance notice—from a game against the New Orleans Pelicans. The issue was never quite explained: Rose said he had a “family issue” and needed to be with his mother, but managed to return for a shootaround the next morning; the team levied a fine and has seemed to move on. Meanwhile, just what Rose contributes on the court is difficult to pin down. Although the team seems to be better with him on the floor than off, and he has certainly bounced back from his final, injury-riddled seasons in Chicago, he has often, especially toward the ends of close games, been an even worse enemy of ball-sharing than Anthony. He clearly still sees himself as the M.V.P. winner he was back in 2011, and elects himself as the Knicks’ last-second savior all too often. Recently, after the absence, Rose expressed his wish to re-sign with the Knicks for a five-year deal at the whopping price of a hundred and fifty million dollars. Knowing the franchise, he’s probably got a chance.

But the worst worry, these days, is for Kristaps Porziņģis, the Knicks’ true rising star and its only real hope for the future, who often languishes, wide open, in the far corners of the court while Rose dribbles himself dizzy. Porziņģis has missed several games in the new year, plagued by Achilles tendonitis. His seven-foot, three-inch stature makes a nagging injury like this the stuff of unrepeatable nightmares. When he has played, he has been a step slow, and his usually gorgeous jumper a few degrees flat. Porziņģis started with seven missed shots in the game against the Pacers, and is reportedly working with Hornacek to fix some faults with his form. (Noah should join in, maybe.) Last night, in a dismal loss against the woeful Dallas Mavericks, he spent much of the first half on the bench, in foul trouble, and looked slightly dazed when on the floor.

I have been to Madison Square Garden once this season, so far, on a lucky, luminous November night: my daughter’s birthday, and the best game of Porziņģis’s still-short career. He scored a best-ever thirty-five points, against the Detroit Pistons, burying deep jumpers and soaring to catch and finish punishing alley-oops. I remember thinking that night that the most satisfying thing in New York City was to watch Porziņģis lope toward the top of the key, catch the ball, and let fly his confident dead-on three, or fake once and glide toward the rim. It was possible, for a moment, to imagine that the old troubles would soon fade, that the Knicks had finally stopped being, well, the Knicks, and that we’d found a new hero for the years to come. This week, I can’t stop watching Noah’s free throw. That night seems like a long time ago.