So what happens when calamity meets catastrophe?
What happens when two teams that can’t get out of their own way are suddenly in each other’s way?
What happens when bad defense meets bad offense, when losing streaks collide, when basketball games are transformed to “Mystery Science Theater 3000” episodes, both sets of fans cackling and snorting because the only other alternative is to take up another hobby?
What then?
“A win is a win,” Carmelo Anthony said.
“A loss is a loss,” Jason Kidd said.
And so there it is, the Knicks allowed to wear the crown as Least Lousy Team in New York City for the moment, humiliating the Nets at Barclays Center 113-83, halting a nine-game losing streak and extending the Nets’ home skid to six. Buying their coach a little more time (assuming the Magic don’t similarly throttle them Friday night anyway) and burying their old teammate-turned-coach with one more pitiable layer of awful.
“We finally put a 48-minute game together,” Mike Woodson said.
“There’s a lot of moving parts,” Kevin Garnett said.
For now, for the moment, it’s the Knicks who get to feel good about themselves, at least for a few hours. And if they’re wise, they also will look at themselves, see how they played Thursday night, see if it doesn’t rattle a few sabers and awaken a few echoes of what they looked like when they played at their very best last season.*
*And, yes, it seems now is a fine time to introduce an asterisk, as a way of keeping this all in perspective, at least as far as the Knicks are concerned. The Nets? Put it this way: they were losing by 34 points in the fourth quarter. Before this, it was hard to conjure the Knicks being 34 points better than ANYONE, at any time, of any game. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
“You have two New York teams fighting for one spot in the same division, so there’s going to be some things going back and forth being said, but we won tonight,” said Carmelo Anthony, who had one of his best games of the year, 19 points, 10 rebounds, 8-out-of-12 from the floor, six assists.* “We will take that. That is all that matters.”
He didn’t mention that the “one spot” was fourth place in the woebegone Atlantic Division, or that the Nets still retain that spot thanks to an advantage of .028 in their winning percentage (and, yes, it’s OK if introducing the term “winning percentage” into this column makes you spit-take your cereal milk).
In truth, this game reminded you there really is a difference between playing poorly and playing indifferently, not that it’s always evidenced by final box scores and daily standings. The Knicks have played poorly for most of this year, have earned the 4-13 record they carry, but even on nights when they get clobbered there is usually a run — cosmetic as it may be — that makes final scores in games like Portland and Atlanta and Minnesota less gruesome than they ought to be.
The Nets?
They have a glass jaw that is an insult to every tomato can that ever walked into a boxing ring with a glass jaw. They get down and they stay down, and they get down some more, and with one rare exception (the Lakers last week) they end up lapped like an old Pinto racing against a Lamborghini.
One more time: the Knicks led this game by 34 points and won it by 30*.
“Well you look at Deron [Williams, still down with a bad ankle], and he’s one of the top point guards in this league. If you have him on the floor, the pick and roll becomes a little easier so we’re asking Shaun [Livingston] and Ty [Taylor] to do that, Kidd said early in his postgame remarks.
Later on, asked to evaluate where the Nets are right now he said: “I think you get evaluated by being whole, it starts there.”
Splendid. So in the space of five minutes, Kidd threw his second- and third-string point guards under a bus (Newsflash! He’s a Player Killer now!) and made sure you were aware that he’s missing his most important player (Newsflash! Absent Tyson Chandler, so are the Knicks!).
So the Knicks get to try and win a game at the Garden Friday for the first time in 36 days, and the Nets get to see if they can help the 3-15 Bucks feel better about themselves Saturday, and it sounded like Melo was all but dribbling the asterisk as he cooed, “You got to start somewhere.”*
As mantras go, that does beat “We’re a laughingstock.”