Knicks painful first impression isn’t free of worry

Well, that was something.

What it was, was a slaughter. A spanking. A smackdown. It was a thrashing and a threshing. It was a beating and a battering, a bloodying and a bludgeoning. It was eye-opening, for sure, and stomach-turning if your loyalties lay with the team wearing white uniforms instead of the ones wearing green.

What it was, was Celtics 132, Knicks 109, at Boston’s TD Garden, and it easily could have been much, much worse if the Knicks hadn’t waved a white flag that the Celtics accepted, but only after poking the Knicks in the eye a few more times. This looked like a buy game in college, the Knicks taking 500 large to get their heads handed to them on Homecoming Day.

The Celtics raised a banner, then laid down a hammer.

“Defensively we have to be a lot better than we were,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said when the carnage was complete. “There was some indecision. When you play a team like that you have to scramble. One effort’s not enough, you have to be second and third and fourth effort. And even then they still have the ability to make.”

They do. At one remarkable point of the second half, the Knicks were shooting 59.1 percent from the field, the C’s 58; the Celtics led 99-70.