This wasn’t just a cute, feel-good story anymore. The Knicks had led by 23 points in the third quarter, and by 16 with less than 10 to go in the game, and Amar’e Stoudemire had a nice hand in all of that, played well, a nice little sidebar story for a frantic team.
Now it was Knicks 74, Bulls 74, and the Garden was a graveyard, equal parts disbelief and disgust filtering out of the stands. The Bulls had the ball, the clock snuck under three minutes, and if it kept going this way, it might well have been the final 180 seconds of Mike Woodson’s time with the Knicks.
“A desperate team,” Stoudemire would say, “and a desperate game.”
To this point he had been a revelation, playing so well on both sides of the floor, the first time he put his knees through a back-to-back gauntlet this year. Normally Stoudemire observes during this part of the game, but Woodson had reached the point where he needed his five best players on the floor.
And Amar’e, remarkably, was on that list.
“He really looked good tonight,” the coach would say later.
He was better than that. He rescued the Knicks. He may have spared his coach. With 2:55 left in the game, he stripped the ball out of Joakim Noah’s hands. Nineteen seconds later, the shot clock bleeding out, he found himself 18 feet away from the basket, open, no other Knick wanting anything to do with the ball.
He knocked it down.
“I had my rhythm back,” he said. “I had my confidence back.”
But there was more: a tough rebound in traffic off a missed Mike Dunleavy 3. A splendid bit of help a few moments later, interrupting a Marquis Teague drive. And then another disruption, helping knock the ball free from Kirk Hinrich. It was by far the most impressive two minutes for Stoudemire in two years.
Maybe it shouldn’t have been this close. Maybe this sixth win of the year tells us more about the Knicks than any of their 15 losses. We’ll see. But in the moment, as the Knicks exhaled at the final buzzer of this 83-78 victory, they did so knowing one inescapable, inexplicable fact: They won because Amar’s Stoudemire wouldn’t let them lose.
And when did you ever think you’d say that again?
“My body and my legs are getting stronger,” Stoudemire said. “I still have a ways to go. But I’m still improving.”
A lot of hard feelings find their way into the Garden now, a lot of justifiable anger, reasonable frustration. You start a season 5-15, you earn that, that’s a winning percentage of .250, exactly the same as the ’62 Mets. And Knicks fans don’t pay these prices expecting to see Choo Choo Bargnani and Marvelous Marv Prigioni.
Even among this eclectic range of cynics, skeptics, critics and romantics, there is always one target spared full wrath, even when he has his own momentary hiccups. That is how badly the fervent and the faithful root for Stoudemire, who remains as bulletproof as any battered $100 million star will ever be.
They ignore follies such as failing to touch a ball for a backcourt violation, allowing Dunleavy an easy layup, and they brush off the times when his fingers turn slippery. Mostly, they focus on the good stuff: the nine rebounds, the 14 points on 7-for-11 shooting, a substantial night on the defensive end from a guy who, even in the best of times, was never confused for Dennis Rodman.
They suffer when he suffers. And there was plenty of that. There were, in fact, plenty of moments early in this season when he looked like one of the worst players in the NBA, a ghost wearing a No. 1 jersey. And even then, the Garden never turned on him, even when he was a pitiful, pitiable shadow of STAT.
“This is a short-term-memory league,” Stoudemire said with a grin. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
Not Knicks fans, not when it comes to him. They didn’t boo him when he carelessly ruined his back during a layup line in Boston during the 2011 playoffs, didn’t abandon him when he smashed his hand using a fire extinguisher as a heavy bag in Miami a year later.
They’ve waited on him, waited on a miracle, and while they may never get that they did get Wednesday night, a two-minute stretch borrowed from 2010, enough to rescue the Knicks from cataclysm. Enough to let the truest believers believe, if only for a night.