Knicks don’t look like contenders as they get thrashed by Celtics again

BOSTON — In a change of philosophy by the team captain, Jalen Brunson chose to look at the positive from a negative result.

And the only positive from Sunday’s 118-105 defeat was the third quarter. Otherwise, the Knicks couldn’t compete with the Celtics.

Again.

“Whatever we did in the first, second and fourth quarter doesn’t really matter,” Brunson said. “The third quarter, what we showed was how we can play and how we can compete and how we can — I don’t really care what’s going on, the way we stepped up in the third is how we should play.”

The Knicks indeed showed more fight than the previous game in Cleveland, but they were pummeled in the bookend quarters and trailed by double digits for most of the afternoon.

The encouraging moments — perhaps the most encouraging in all three humbling losses to the Celtics this season — arrived in the third quarter, when the struggling Mikal Bridges was benched for Miles McBride and New York cut the deficit to four points.

For a team searching for belief that it might have a sH๏τ against the Celtics in a playoff series, it was the straw to grasp at.

Brunson, who typically focuses on the negative because it fuels improvement, was cryptic about the third-quarter surge, but it felt like there was an underlying message about otherwise playing selfishly.

“We just had a level of not really caring anymore,” Brunson said. “Just all right, we’ve got to go somehow. I mean, from my point of view, that’s what it felt like.”

What did he mean by don’t care?

“Don’t care about, like, me,” Brunson said. “Just try to find a way to win. We’ve done it in the past against other teams, but it’s the first time we did it against this team. We can do it, but we have to do it for four quarters.”