The New York Knicks are 0-3, and Jalen Brunson isn't waiting for anybody to ask whose fault it is.

After Sunday's loss to the Orlando Magic, the Knicks' third straight defeat to open the season, Brunson put it plainly: "Everything falls on my shoulders." He was talking about an offense that has looked nothing like the one that carried New York to a title last spring. A reigning champion starting 0-3 is rare. The last team to do it was the 2011-12 Dallas Mavericks, fresh off beating the Heat, and that's not a comparison the garden faithful wanted to see written down on a Sunday night.

That Mavericks team is worth a beat of memory here, not a jinx. Dallas shook off its slow start in a lockout-shortened season, made the playoffs, and still got bounced by Oklahoma City in the first round. The moral isn't that a bad opening week dooms you. It's that it doesn't fix itself either. Somebody has to go find the offense, and in New York that job has landed on Brunson by his own admission.

Why Are the Knicks 0-3

Three losses in three games is still a tiny sample, the kind of stretch that can turn on a couple of stretches of cold shooting and nothing more sinister. But "sputtering offense," the phrase hanging over this team right now, is the specific complaint, and that's a different conversation than just losing close games. An offense that can't generate easy looks in the first week tends to be an offense still figuring out who does what, which spacing works, which lineups actually play nice together. Brunson taking it on himself publicly is either leadership or pressure, and with this guy it's usually both at once.

The Knicks aren't alone in the NBA's early basement. Milwaukee is 0-3. So is Sacramento. Early standings this time of year are mostly noise, a handful of coin-flip results dressed up as a crisis. The difference for New York is the banner going up behind them. Nobody circles the calendar for a rebuilding Kings team in late October. Everybody circles it for the champs.

What's Next for New York

The schedule doesn't offer a soft landing. The Knicks host the Detroit Pistons, who arrive 3-0 and sitting atop the Eastern Conference on their own three-game win streak. That's about as unglamorous a get-right spot as exists in this league: a team playing with full confidence against one searching for its first.

What I'll actually be watching from that game isn't the final score. It's whether the offense Brunson described looks any different in the half-court, whether the ball is moving earlier in the clock, whether the role players are getting the clean catch-and-shoot looks a contender's offense is supposed to generate. Three games is early. A fourth straight stumble against a team this hot would start to change the conversation from small sample to real one.

The good news for New York: this group has already proven, as recently as last season, that it knows how to find its footing under a brighter spotlight than this. The early-season version of a champion rarely looks like the one that was hoisting a trophy five months earlier. The question the Knicks have to answer isn't whether they can be good. It's how fast they remember how.