Here are some of the highlights, lowlights, scandals, trades and car accidents of the past week in the New York sports world.

Nate-Gate: The surging Knicks have won three games in a row, they’re spreading the ball around on offense and playing solid team defense – yes, defense (somewhere Dave DeBusschere is smiling). They’re moving up in the standings, but Nate-Gate is in full bloom, with chants of “We want Nate” raining down from the Garden faithful while Nate Robinson is tethered to the bench. Whenever he doesn’t play, the Knicks win, so the erratic guard may never see action again. Shooting at the wrong basket, too much goofing around and breezily fraternizing with the enemy have done him in. After realizing that he’s getting paid $4 million to watch NBA games a few times a week and is getting front row seats to boot, he’s not complaining, and is settling into his role as the Knicks’ Little Bit o’ Luck guy. He’s starting to make …

The last Giants game will forever be known as The Year the Giants Ruined Thanksgiving. Every time I bit into one of my turkey sandwiches in the days that followed I tasted the Giants inept performance. When I dug into a meal of leftovers, all I could think of was the zombie-like, going-through-the-motions play of the Giants in Denver that night (do zombies go through the motions?). Would I ever be able to enjoy and celebrate Thanksgiving again? How could turkey taste so bitter? Things were not looking good for Big Blue (or my taste buds). In fact they looked dead and buried. But yesterday, they climbed out of their grave and defeated Dallas for the second time this season (does that make them zombies for this game, too? I’m really confusing myself here). They’re still trailing in the division and wild card races, but they’re still alive.
After digging themselves a 10-0 hole in the second quarter, the Giants showed some life, grit and fortitude …

Daniel Day-Lewis has a new movie coming out that’s a sequel of sorts to There Will Be Blood. It’s based on my experiences as a parent, and is called There Will Be Yelling. In honor of that soon-to-be-released film, we’ll look back at the New York week in sports with an Oscar-like Best Performance slant. This week we saw a record being broken, a coach getting fired, upsets, disappointments, a baseball manager coaching a football player, hot stove rumors galore, a middle linebacker put on season-ending IR, a Yankee legend dying, two Jet wins, no Giants game, a kaleidoscopic, injured quarterback and Meredith Baxter announcing to the world that she’s a lesbian, which pretty much changes my whole world view. I’m going to have to reevaluate everything that’s happened in my life to date. I don’t even know who I am anymore.

Record-Breaking Performance of the Week: The Nets – It’s official, they’ve broken the record for worst start in NBA history. Who knew clearing …

Thanksgiving is the best of all holidays. There’s football all day long, eating all day long and drinking all day long (actually that sounds like most Sundays during football season). I think there’s something in there about Pilgrims and Indians, too, but I can’t remember what it is. A Chiefs-Patriots game maybe? Did they have muskets and kill turkeys in the old AFL? Or was it Redskins-Cowboys? The Knicks won a game this week, but it was against the Nets so I’m not sure if that really counts (those teams are a combined 3-27 so far this season), the hockey teams all won some and lost some, the Jets were trounced by the hated Patriots, the Giants went 1-1, and the Mets and Yankees started looking at possible free agents and trades, but they all have something to be thankful for during the holiday season. So here we go:

The Knicks are thankful that the Nets are worse than they are.

The Knicks are also thankful for 1970 and 1973 because that may be it for another 30 years or …

The last time the Giants won a game, they played in the Polo Grounds, wore leather helmets, FDR was president, the talking picture machine was all the rage and the repeal of Prohibition healed a nation. Or maybe they last won a game in October. But the former sounds more dramatic. Yesterday’s win prevented Big Blue from being the first team to start a season 5-0 and then lose their next five games.
The win wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t easy and made Giants fans nervous, but it was a win. And since this isn’t the BCS, that’s all that matters. The team needed to stop the snowball of losing that was careening down the mountain in East Rutherford and pull out a win one way or another. And that’s what they did – pulled out a win not one way but the other. Getting that winning feeling back is all it takes to turn their season around (well, let’s hope so).
Eli Manning earned …

The Knicks won a game this week! And The Answer may be coming to New York (so the question must be: Will a desperate team do anything to keep their fans interested?). But with last Friday’s loss, the Knicks established the worst 10-game start in franchise history. Things could be a lot worse, though; here are some other bad starts throughout history that may help them feel better about themselves: The Hindenburg blew up over New Jersey on the first of its 10 scheduled round-trips between Europe and the United States, killing 36 people; the Titanic hit an iceberg and sunk four days into its maiden voyage; William Henry Harrison died of a cold one month into his presidency in 1841; Wally Backman lasted four days as manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks before he was unceremoniously shown the door; Gilligan’s three-hour tour got off to an inauspicious start, getting stranded on a deserted island for 15 years, until the castaways were miraculously rescued, followed by them buying …

The Yankees win the World Series and as soon as you can say the words “Johnny Damon wants a four-year contract” the rest of the New York–area teams go down the tubes. They went a combined 5-11 this past week. It must be a hangover. Are all the local teams riding on the Yankees’ coattails and going to all of their parties? It’s also possible that many of the area teams just stink. The Knicks and Nets went a combined 0-7 this week, and are 1-16 for the year, for instance. It was only the always-good Devils that skewed the combined record by going 4-0, and they barely count as a local team.

Here’s a day-by-day look at the past seven days.

Friday: The injury-riddled Nets lost to Philly, which kept them winless for the season, and the Devils beat the Islanders in a continuation of the New Jersey–Long Island War of 1801, in which it was so cold and icey out during the Battle of Massapequa that both sides just gave up …

What do you do when you lose a self-proclaimed must-win game? The Giants did just that yesterday, wrenching defeat from the jaws of victory. That’s four losses in a row and counting. And they’ve lost each game in a different way: A bad defensive effort started things off, the offense then followed suit, a total team disaster was next and now a crushing, last-minute defeat rounds things out. Let’s count the ways the Giants blew yesterday’s game vs. the Chargers.
The first ominous sign was the botched field goal attempt on the first drive of the game. When the play happened, it looked like Lawrence Tynes just decided to not kick the ball. Was there a fake field goal on, but he was the only one who knew about it? Did the voices in his head tell him a trick play was on? The announcers were no help as they didn’t have a clue as to what happened. But on closer inspection, Jeff Feagles …

The Giants’ transformation from an elite NFL team to ineffectual mediocrity is astounding. Against the Saints, the defense was the culprit; against the Cardinals, it was the offense; but yesterday against the Eagles, it was every aspect of the team that was horrible. The Giants are misfiring on all cylinders. Alarms are sounding, and people are running to the panic room. Are the Giants in a slump? Or are they a bad team? Whichever the case, they’re looking pretty ugly these days, and I mean Oakland Raiders ugly.
Right now, the defense can’t stop anybody – or anything. If a stray dog ran out onto the field, it would run right by the 11 men on defense and score a touchdown. Johnny Damon would go wild against these guys. Not only wouldn’t they be covering third base, they wouldn’t cover home plate either. The Giants certainly miss Kenny Phillips, Aaron Ross, Michael Boley and Chris Canty, but do they miss them that much? They’ve …

All anybody’s talking about in the New York area is the Islanders’ first regulation win over the Rangers (though Jimmy Rollins predicted it on Monday). You can’t walk down the street without somebody stopping you and asking all about the hockey team from Long Island. Will they get on a roll? Is John Tavares the real deal? Islanders, Islanders, Islanders! Everybody’s forgetting all about the bad start of the two local basketball teams, and does anybody even know that the Yankees are in the World Series this year? All the Islanders-all-the-time talk is really taking the pressure off the other local teams.

Here at Hot Stove, we know that the Yankees are in the World Series again, as you can’t get anything by us. The Bronx Bombers paid their $200 million entry fee into the Series, setting up a rematch of the 1950 Fall Classic. And with so many off-days, it seems like there are about 59 years between games in this postseason. In the Series we’ve already seen Cliff Lee nonchalantly put the Bombers’ bats to sleep, …

Ok, that’s two bad games in a row. Last week in New Orleans the defense was the culprit, and last night the offense lost the game for the Giants. Big Blue feasted on the weak teams the first five weeks, but now facing solid teams two weeks in a row, they looked lousy in both games.

The D wasn’t great but came up with two big stops at the end and were good enough to win the game (though the injuries to Kenny Phillips, Aaron Ross and Michael Boley seem to be catching up to them). The offense, on the other hand, was off-kilter and inconsistent all game long. Even Jeff Feagles was terrible. Here’s what we didn’t like:

Eli Manning – he threw three interceptions, only completed about half his passes and looked rattled and confused by Arizona’s defense the whole game. And what’s with all the delay of game penalties? He spent most of his time at the line of scrimmage shaking off Jorge Posada. The receivers didn’t help …

It was a brutal week for the New York football teams, as the Giants got killed and the Jets fell to lowly Buffalo and lost Kris Jenkins for the rest of the season. Even the hockey teams mixed in some debacles with a few wins. And something bad probably happened to the Mets even though their season is long over.

But even after last night’s loss, the Yankees are sitting pretty, with a 3-2 lead in the series and heading back home. With a budget as high as our country’s deficit, the Yanks had two options this offseason: Use their money to cure the U.S. economy or buy a whole bunch of free agents. They chose the latter, and it’s working out just fine (well, for them). Unfortunately, the one aspect of the playoffs that has stood out the most is the atrocious umpiring. The horrible umpiring in this year’s postseason is unprecedented, but there are things out there that are actually worse, if you can believe it. …