Rose: Knicks more talented than Heat, but 'basketball is a team sport'

Every NBA season starts out with a certain measure of hope for every team, and while it turns out to be false hope for many, it's hard to recall any expectation that's fallen further from reality than Derrick Rose's preseason assertion that the New York Knicks were a superteam.

The Knicks turned out to be super lousy, and at 28-47 are headed to the lottery for the fourth straight year. Rose, though, still feels his team has more talent than its playoff-hopeful opponent Friday night, the Miami Heat.

"I think that we're more talented," Rose told reporters at Friday's shootaround. "But it shows that basketball is a team sport."

Like the Knicks, the Heat have defied expectations, but in inverse fashion. After starting the season 11-30, they've engineered a complete turnaround that has them sitting in seventh place in the Eastern Conference, a game under .500 with seven games to play. While the Heat appear to have made the most of the talent on their roster, the Knicks, in Rose's view, have been less than the sum of their parts.

"Any year in the league it's about whoever catches a rhythm," Rose said. "No matter how your season is going, or where you're at in your season, you can always catch a rhythm and they caught theirs at the right time, winning 12 or 13 games (in a row). And they've been playing great basketball ever since then. We never caught that luck this year."

Though the constant confusion surrounding the Knicks' constantly changing offense has drawn much of the scrutiny, Rose pointed to the other end of the floor as the reason the they haven't played up to their purported talent level.

"Defensively, we weren't that consistent this year," he said. "And it shows with our record."