Jamal Crawford scored 41 points on Saturday night, hitting 17 of his first 20 shots, but the Knicks ended up losing to the expansion Charlotte Bobcats, 107-101.

"We pretty much milked him too much, and that wasn't fair to him," Marbury said of Crawford. "Instead of us milking him in spurts, we basically drained him."

Crawford missed his final five shots.

"The thing is, he had a hot hand going, and you've got to stay with that," Coach Lenny Wilkens said of Crawford. "But you have to incorporate other people with it and not forget about everybody else. And I don't think that hurt us as much as there were several times where we had the clock down and then we'd lose sight of somebody defensively, and all of a sudden, they'd make a big shot."

Crawford had 13 points in the first quarter and 25 points by the time he took his first break, with 5 minutes 35 seconds left in the first half.

His teammates simply stepped aside and let him fire.

"Honestly, it doesn't even matter," Crawford said of his scoring burst. "If we had won, we would have had something to talk about. But we didn't. So it's all for naught."