Kristian Winfield: Knicks keep winning despite troubles holding big leads

NEW YORK — The Knicks keep building big leads. They also keep coughing them up.

It’s become the defining — and increasingly troubling — pattern for a team that beat the Charlotte Hornets, 119-104, on the second night of a back-to-back on Wednesday.

New York has now won five of its last six, the lone loss coming in Boston on Tuesday.

They’ve also blown double-digit leads in five of those six games.

— Up 45-33 on the Nets before letting it shrink to a one-possession game by halftime.

— Up 101-88 on Milwaukee with 10:18 to play before the Bucks erased nearly all of it in five minutes.

— Up 41-22 on Toronto after one quarter before the Raptors carved it down to three in the third.

— Up 37-23 on Boston before Jaylen Brown scored 33 across the second and third, flipping the game.

And then came Wednesday — a fresh opportunity to respond — against a Hornets team so dysfunctional they’ve practically reserved their annual draft lottery seating.

New York raced ahead by 20 midway through the second quarter. And then? The same script.

They exhaled. Charlotte didn’t. The Hornets ripped off a 25-11 spurt, and it took a Jalen Brunson bailout 3 at the buzzer just to crawl into halftime up six.

It was exactly the lack of urgency that burned them 24 hours earlier — and it’s the kind of slippage that keeps elite teams out of the elite tier.

Because the best of the best don’t play with their food. They finish their meal and order dessert.

The Knicks rebuilt a 22-point cushion early in the fourth only to watch LaMelo Ball torch the game back open. Ball either scored or assisted on 23 straight Charlotte points in the fourth, slicing the lead from the mid-20s to eight in minutes.

He finished with 34 points, nine assists and a flurry of backbreaking shot-making that forced the Knicks to sweat out a game that should’ve been over long before. Head coach Mike Brown touched on on-ball defense after Jaylen Brown eviscerated the Knicks on Tuesday.

“We’ve done a pretty good job as of late guarding the basketball and being physical without fouling. We didn’t do it well last night or at least to the capabilities of what we know we can do,” Mike Brown said ahead of tipoff on Wednesday. “And so it was good for u to go through that and to understand first this thing is a marathon and we can get better and we’ll keep getting better.”

Fortunately for New York, the Hornets aren’t the Celtics. Boston completes comebacks; Charlotte crosses its fingers.

For every ugly Knicks possession, the Hornets had four worse ones. But this isn’t the competition New York is measuring itself against.

The Knicks want to be up there with Oklahoma City — the reigning champs now 21-1 and steamrolling the league. If New York plans to hang in that weight class, they need consistency. They need the ability to hold leads, to extend them, not casually hand them back.

Karl-Anthony Towns, meanwhile, ate well for his late Thanksgiving.

Facing a Hornets roster with no real center to challenge him, Towns bulldozed his way to 35 points on 13-of-23 shooting to go along with 18 rebounds — a follow-up to the 29 he dropped in Boston. He capped the night with a statement two-handed reverse cradle dunk in transition.

Brunson scored 26 points on 9-of-16 shooting, and all five starters scored in double figures, with Mikal Bridges finishing with 16 points, and Miles McBride and Josh Hart adding 15 points apiece.

Next up: the Utah Jazz on Friday, followed by the Orlando Magic.