BOSTON — This was rock bottom. This was the nadir. This was a Wednesday night in the middle of March that felt like the bottom of the Grand Canyon, that felt like the loneliest spot in the desert. This was Pepsi Center, Denver, Colo., where it felt for all the world like the Knicks’ season had come to die.
“Everything happens for a reason,” Tyson Chandler said.
In the darkest moments of March 13, it was difficult to understand how that could be possible. Carmelo Anthony’s homecoming had been a disaster; Nuggets fans had bathed him in bile, all but spat on him, and he had spent much of the night looking like Jim Brown dragging himself back to the huddle, his knee a mess, his confidence shot, his game in tatters.
And that wasn’t even the bad part.
The bad part would come late in the first half when Chandler collided with Corey Brewer, crumpled to the floor, and couldn’t pick himself up – couldn’t put any weight on his left knee, in fact, and had to have himself carried off the floor, all 7-feet-1 of him, by James White and Chris Copeland.
If you know a Knicks fan, you know what happened then, and if you know a lot of Knicks fans, you really know what happened then. E-mails started whipping back and forth. Text messages. Phone calls. A small sampling of my own e-mail inbox:
“Season over.”
“Of course.”
“Are you #@$#%$ kidding me?”
“#@#$%$#!!!”
“@#$%^*#&%$##@!!!!!!!”
And so on.
“It’s a long season,” Chandler said yesterday, inside a small, empty room on the second floor of the Ritz Carlton Boston Common, smiling and han ding a fruit plate to a Knicks PR man. “Every year you’re reminded of that. But I think we’ve been really reminded of that this year.”
As Chandler spoke he admitted that memories of that night in Colorado are fuzzy at best, and there are times it feels like that happened in a different season, a different year … maybe to an entirely different player. But he was certain: that was rock bottom. That was the nadir. There were moments that night — as the Knicks fell to the Nuggets 117-94, two nights after getting hammered 92-63 by the Warriors in Oakland — when it was you started to wonder if they’d ever win another game again.
And yet …
“And yet,” Chandler said, “here we are.”
Here they are, a month and a half later, sitting on the doorstep of their first sweep since the stardust-frosted ’99 team swept the Hawks en rout to the Eastern Conference championship. Here they are. They would lose their next two games after Denver, in Portland and at Los Angeles, the quicksand under their sneakers seemed made of glue.
And then they won a game in Salt Lake City, last stop on the trip, and they kept winning, kept winning and winning, stumbling only in Chicago, in overtime, and in Charlotte, when coach Mike Woodson nearly had to suit up so they could field a full team. Anthony got his knee drained, and it was if he’d had a knee transplant.
Chandler? His knee turned out not to be the issue that night, it was a recurring neck issue instead, one that kept him out plenty the balance of the season, one that has rendered him far less than 100 percent in this series so far but one, he insists, will not keep him from doing what the Knicks, as a team, expect themselves to do.
“Even while I was out we were able to make a run,” Chandler said. “And that meant that I could get well, I could get better, I didn’t have to come back before I was ready. In fact, the guys would keep saying it: get better. Worry about that. We’ll take care of things while you do.”
Chandler is one big reason why it would behoove the Knicks to win today, to clinch the series even with J. R. Smith watching in street clothes, to sit idly by and wait for the Pacers and the Hawks to battle, as Ray Felton said Friday night, “seven long, hard games.” Or, at the least, simply to let Chandler take the final few steps back. Given where this all started, on the ground of a basketball court in Denver seven weeks ago, it really is a remarkable place to be.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com