What we get now are glimpses. Peeks. Teases. The Knicks are not yet whole, not yet complete, won’t be whole for at least a month, and that’s assuming nobody else spends any quality time inside an MRI tube between now and the time the cast comes off Raymond Felton’s hand.
Still, we get snippets that look like movie trailers, that sound like one musician sampling another’s work. Last night we got the Knicks steamrolling the Spurs in the second half, snapping San Antonio’s seven-game winning streak with a decisive 100-83 throttling. It was their fourth game in five nights, but the Spurs weren’t asking for asterisks.
“They kicked our butt,” coach Gregg Popovich said.
“That’s a very good ballclub,” Tim Duncan said.
They can be for wide stretches of time, and the fact that two of their 22 wins have come at San Antonio’s expense proves that — every bit as much as back-to-back losses to the pedestrian likes of the Kings and Blazers emphasizes how much more they need to do before they can prove to the skeptics and the stragglers that they are as good as their record.
“It’s good to play well against great teams like that,” Jason Kidd said. “But you can’t just do that against the elite teams if you want to be considered elite. You have to play that way against teams you’re supposed to beat, too.”
This was a feel-good game in a lot of ways for the Knicks, at a time when that was precisely what they needed. For the first time in weeks they played a complete defensive game, as if they had seen a few old-school Knicks rebroadcasts on MSG and decided they, too, were going to subscribe to no-layup law.
On the other side, Carmelo Anthony got his points — a game-high 23 on 9-for-20 shooting — and if he wasn’t quite the full-out decoy he was in San Antonio in November, when the Knicks stunned the Spurs, he was happy to keep throwing out of double teams on a night when “everyone contributed in their own way,” as he put it.
For Melo, a fair percentage of that included trying to get the other franchise cornerstone untracked. Amar’e Stoudemire is still a shadow of himself but Anthony kept feeding him the ball, kept encouraging him, and so did the Garden. New York is not always the most patient place, and the Garden isn’t always the easiest gym in which to play your way into shape.
Still, the 19,003 in the house greeted all 10 points and both his rebounds the way a college fieldhouse usually erupts when the walk-ons crack the boxscore.
“It’s going to come,” Stoudemire insisted.
For parts of two years, the central theme/worry/obsession among Knicks fans has been this: Would the two of them, Stat and Melo, ever mesh together? Could they? Would they spend their professional lives jammed together in an uncomfortable partnership, like an especially tense “Behind the Music” segment — especially now that Stoudemire’s game more closely resembles Billy Paultz’?
“They’ll be fine together,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson insisted, as he has from the moment he was hired. “They’ve both played at a high level in this league. They’ll figure it out.”
So we get hints and clues and previews of what might be there, too, same as we have gotten from the whole team so far. Rasheed Wallace teased everyone by looking 27 again until his feet reminded him he’s really 57. Felton had recaptured much of his lost mojo and regained his status as a Garden favorite before his pinky exiled him to the sideline. Stoudemire is two games into his season. Iman Shumpert is a few weeks away from adding another level of intrigue.
“We’re in a good place,” J.R. Smith, one of the unlikeliest Garden folk heroes ever, said after turning his own routine 20-point, five-rebound, three-assist night off the bench. “We’re getting there. We’re getting where we want to be. We have to be patient and keep working hard.’’
Nothing about this season will happen quickly, or easily. They won’t even be whole until after Valentine’s Day. Still, there are nights we get snippets from the Knicks. We get spurts. We get peeks. And they are tantalizing.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com