As they prepared for Friday night’s meeting at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks were able to replay film from their first meeting with Oklahoma City a week ago and pick out corrections that needed to be made, and maybe even – at least in coach Tom’s case Thibodeau – still fuming over a bad call that helped the game slip away in the final minutes.

But the message delivered and received was simpler, a message Thibodeau has emphasized to his teams for years. Play for 48 minutes.

The Knicks built a 14-point lead against the Thunder last week and saw it disappear when OKC finally took the lead with a three-pointer after Isaiah Hartenstein parried an aerial ball along the baseline. However, replays showed he had left the field. Oklahoma City won by 10 points for its 14th straight victory, ending the Knicks’ winning streak by nine points. The Thunder went 30-6 against the Knicks 25-13 on Friday night.

“Yeah, you just have to play 48 minutes,” Thibodeau said Friday night before calling a game in which the Knicks fell behind early and trailed by 28 in the second quarter. “A hard-fought away game. You have to be strong on both sides of the ball. It went all the way to the cable. We have to finish stronger.”

The Knicks bolstered their backs this time with the return of Deuce McBride, who had been sidelined the previous five games with a hamstring strain, giving them a key substitute to give the starters a few minutes of rest. But the Knicks were reluctant to attribute that loss — or the two that followed — to a lack of depth or the minutes the starters needed to play, and instead focused on their own shortcomings.

“I learned we should have done better down the stretch,” Josh Hart said. “We need to get Jalen (Brunson) off the ball a little bit more. There’s a physical guy like Lu Dort lifting him from 94 feet. We make him expend a lot of energy just to get the ball across half the field. We need to make sure we look after each other and that we perform at a high level. I think we built a 12 or 14 point lead at one point, so we have to keep going when we have things like that to bury teams and not keep the door open.”

“You have to be able to keep it up, and a lot of times it comes down to the fact that we had a five-point lead late in the game,” Thibodeau said. “And there’s a play — a loose ball that’s a scramble play — and Isaiah was out of bounds on the play and we were up (two). And they get a threesome out of it. This is a big piece. They react great to the ball. With Shai (Gilgeous-Alexander) and Jalen Williams, there’s obviously a lot of pressure on your defense. Once the ball is shot, you have to return to your bodies. You have to finish everything you do.”

The Thunder also learned something when they faced the Knicks and Celtics in back-to-back games, overcoming double-digit deficits to earn convincing wins both times before losing a close game in Cleveland. Maybe it was because the Knicks were back on the schedule Friday, but Thunder coach Mark Daigneault put them in the same class as Boston and Cleveland.

“They’re really good teams,” he said. “I respect, they put you in a lot of dilemmas. They all have the “pick-your-gift” element. There isn’t just one thing you can take with you that will lead to success. They are well trained. You are prepared. They are competitive. They’re all really good teams. We have a lot of respect for them and we had to earn the wins in these games. It was great for us at this point in the season to compete against teams of this level. But all three of these teams are monster teams.”

Daigneault battled a non-COVID illness while masking his pregame interview, noting that he stocked up on fluids, ate a healthy diet and took a nap. He knew what lay ahead for him and his team.

“You’ll be hungry,” he said. “They felt like the way the game went they let us get away with it. It was a great game. They are a great team. They threw the first punch. They really had us on our heels for most of the game. So they will be ready on their home court after the last game.”

Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, as well as nearly every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.