Rose: Hornacek needs to urge Knicks to defend

The New York Knicks are in dire straits with their floundering defense and Derrick Rose sees coaching as a potential answer.

Rose was careful to say that a myriad of factors are feeding into New York's bottom-six defense, but he did single out head coach Jeff Hornacek for needing to do more.

"Our defense triggers a lot of things," Rose told ESPN's Ian Begley. "And I told (Hornacek) he has to be on us hard about defense every day. Like, beat it in our heads where we get tired of hearing him talking about it."

Rose, no great shakes as a defender himself, gave a stark account of the Knicks' frustrating inconsistency on the defensive end.

"It's not just one element," Rose said. "It's all of it - effort, schemes, decision-making, personnel, communication. It's everything.

"You can tell when we're out there. You have some games where we have everything clicking. It's no middle ground with us. It's either we look good, or we look quite different than that. I wanted to say another word, but quite different than that.

"We got to have an in-between. Then right when we're slipping, we got to be able to let everybody be aware of that and try to fix it - not after the game, but during the game."

Rose's urges come on the heels of reports that veteran players on the Knicks were frustrated with Hornacek's defensive schemes. Assistant coach Kurt Rambis has been tasked to command the defense but the results remain poor.

New York conceded an average of 113 points per game over a nine-game stretch before submitting two decent efforts this week. Not unrelated, the Knicks dropped nine of 11 during that span.

Hornacek, however, countered that his team stresses defense in every practice. Their efforts in practice needs to carry over to the court.

"We do defensive situations every day. Try to go live. It's a case of continuing to work on it," Hornacek said. "At times, it's pretty decent and other times we kind of revert back. Again, we have to do a better job of just keeping harping on them about it and putting them in different situations in practice and they'll have to do better at doing it more consistently, so we all have to be better at it."