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 …

Whether he likes it or not, the only chance the Rangers have of winning these days is if Henrik Lundqvist plays like Superman. The team has been offensively challenged most of the season, and defensively challenged as well, so with that going for them, they need Lundqvist to be perfect, which is, of course, impossible. Let’s look at the last three games.
They went up to Buffalo and tightened up their defense, and lo and behold, came out of the game with a victory. Yes, defense is important. “The Rangers weren’t going to let us play inside,” said Buffalo goalie Ryan Miller. “They closed off (the middle).” The team played a solid game, and Chris Drury had this to say about their effort, “There were a lot of things we did well, and we just played hard.” Yes, playing hard is important. Yet, they only scored two goals, and were 0-2 on the power play. Lundqvist shrugged off his slump and outdueled Miller, making …

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 …

The Rangers are in a freefall and it looks like the only thing that can stop them is the break in the schedule. With no game until Saturday, now’s a good time to break things down and list all of the Rangers’ strengths this season:
Marian Gaborik can score goals.
Ok, that about wraps that up. Now for their weaknesses:
Henrik Lundqvist is having a subpar year. The defense is porous in front of him but he still lets in far too many goals that should be stopped. Hopefully he’s just in a slump.
The defense is too soft.
The defense has too many breakdowns.
The defense is constantly out of position.
The defense lets too many opposition forwards stand alone, untouched in front of the net.
The defense chases the puck around in their own zone leaving opposition players wide open.
The defense can’t stop anybody from scoring touchdowns in the red zone – oops, sorry, getting the Giants’ freefall mixed up with …

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 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 usual state of affairs when the Rangers sign a free agent goes something like this: Free agent is past his prime with his best days well behind him, he signs an outrageously sized contract and then plays like crap while laughing all the way to the bank (see Redden, Wade or Fleury, Theo). But the Blueshirts have hit the jackpot this year, with Marian Gaborik, Vinny Prospal and Ales Kotalik (well, three out of four ain’t bad – Donald Brashear and the word “jackpot” don’t go together – except to his agent). Unfortunately, it’s the rest of the roster that’s dragging the team down.
Gaborik, Prospal and Kotalik have scored a combined 26 goals. The Rangers have a total of 62, which means those three free-agent pickups have contributed 42% of the team’s scoring. Prospal’s the bargain of the century, with his one-million-dollar contract (I’m so old I remember when a million dollars was a lot of money). Kotalik gives the Rangers the point man …

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 …

Eighteen games into the Rangers’ season and this is what we’ve seen so far: the effort comes and goes, the scoring comes and goes, the forecheck comes and goes, the backchecking comes and goes and the defense comes and goes. And they’re not very physical, as we saw when no one stood up for Chris Drury on Saturday night. Their 7-1 start has been followed by a 3-6-1 stretch, so they’re also inconsistent. With a break in the Rangers’ schedule, now’s a good time to divide up the roster into four categories and see which players are overachieving, which are underachieving and which are, unfortunately, Michal Rozsival.
Godsends: Marian Gaborik, Vinny Prospal, Michael Del Zotto, Matt Gilroy. Gaborik has done everything and more that was expected of him when he signed. He’s seamlessly fit in with the Rangers and produced at a superstar level. Health remains the only question mark for him. Prospal’s given the team more than was expected, and has certainly earned …

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, …

The Rangers ended their three-game losing streak by beating Phoenix last night, 5-2, winning the game for former Ranger announcer Bill “The Big Whistle” Chadwick. “We’re dedicating our season to the announcing legend. So much of my youth was spent watching the Rangers on channel 9, listening to the antics of Chadwick and his partner, Jim Gordon, that for a while there, I thought Chadwick was my father, and my real dad was just some guy from the neighborhood who sat around the living room drinking vodka all the time. We had to win this game for The Big Whistle or I’d never forgive myself,” said captain Chris Drury. (Ok, he didn’t come close to saying that; I said it to myself while I was riding on the subway this morning.)
The Blueshirts were going the wrong way the last week or so, but last night they turned things around and put in a steady performance. They fell asleep after taking a 4-0 lead, and got …

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. …