INDIANAPOLIS — Raymond Felton has spent most of his season reminding us why he was the perfect choice — really, the only choice — to fill the void left by the departure of Jeremy Lin. The two men might have posted similar numbers this season — Lin: 13.4 points, 6.1 assists and 44 percent shooting; Felton: 13.9 points, 5.5 assists, 43 percent.
But it was Felton’s toughness, his willingness to grit his teeth through a variety of aches and pains and bumps and bruises, that re-endeared him to New York City. Lin famously kept himself out of the playoffs last year as a Knick, and then wound up on the sidelines again this postseason in Houston. Maybe he sat legitimately, maybe not.
But mostly, Felton played, and has played, and that’s mattered, especially for most of these playoffs. Felton was as big a reason as Carmelo Anthony that the Knicks prevailed against the Celtics, and he was having a good series against the Pacers until he sprained his ankle late in Game 2 and missed the whole fourth quarter.
In Game 3, whether it was the ankle or simply one of those nights, Felton had, well, one of those nights. And it cost the Knicks, cost them badly, and provided a reminder of just how essential a piece he is to what the Knicks do and who they are.
“He’s been pretty solid throughout the playoffs for us,” said Knicks coach Mike Woodson, who doles out individual praise with an eye-dropper, so that qualifies as a full-on gush. “I’m looking at that as a game when he just didn’t have it. We didn’t have it either, as a team.”
Still, it will help the greater good if Felton takes care of his own difficulties tonight because it might not have been until he went missing across those 48 minutes that you could see with clarity all that he brings on almost every other night. If he isn’t Chris Paul or Russell Westbrook, that’s hardly a slam; he’s Ray Felton, and that’s exactly what the Knicks have required most of this season.
What he has done, miraculously, is turn what seemed certain to be a season-long soap opera about Lin’s absence into a footnote, an afterthought, an addendum. Felton may actually have been the only point guard in professional basketball to have pulled that off.
He had been a popular Knick, had tugged at the fans’ heartstrings when he was exiled to Denver as part of the Carmelo Anthony trade and spoke longingly about his time in Gotham. The fact that he underperformed as a Nugget, then ate his way out of Portland, was almost beside the point.
He wanted to be in New York, never wanted to leave, and on some level that connected with Knicks fans the same way Amar’e Stoudemire did.
“This,” Felton said at the start of the playoffs, “is where I wanted to be all along.”
So that helped mute the alarm bells that were shattering the city last summer when Lin tried to bluff the Knicks into matching the absurd contract the Rockets gave him, the one his people had gone back to get, the one with the poison-pill balloon payment that seemed especially designed to hamstring the Knicks.
People howled, of course, because Linsanity was the best thing to happen to the Knicks in years. The Knicks were an organization short on credibility after a decade in the dumper, and after throwing so much good money after so many bad players, some threw up their hands that this would be where James Dolan would finally declare, “Enough!” Some even swore they were switching their allegiance to Brooklyn over this transaction. You know who you are. I saved your emails.
And as bad as it got, it could have been worse.
Because Felton was a hard choice to blast. Most fans conceded there was still a part of them that regretted Felton had to be shipped west at all. And the fact is, he was the perfect motor for this assemblage of Knicks, and has been.
And needs to be tonight. That’s non-negotiable.
“This is a gut-check game for us,” Anthony said, and he’s right, and it means Tyson Chandler has to stop playing small and Melo has to be superstar big.
And it means Felton has to make it all hum smoothly. You haven’t heard a lot of what-ifs among Knicks fans lately. But if they have nothing but time on their hands shortly, that could surely change.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com