MIAMI — This was where the harshest of all basketball lessons was delivered, where the strictest of all sentences was meted out. Here, in this city so often blessed by the sun, the Knicks were cast off into darkness, swallowed by the abyss.
And maybe — maybe — something else was born in its place.
Here, across three rainy days and three humbling nights, this was the unsubtle message the Knicks were forced to absorb: You’re not good enough. You’re not nearly good enough. You aren’t talented enough. You aren’t deep enough. You don’t have nearly enough character to play in the deep end of the water.
Adult swim time, kids. Out of the pool.
“I know we’re better than what we showed here,” coach Mike Woodson said three days shy of seven months ago, the night the Heat finally rid themselves of the Knicks, a five-game series in which the Knicks won once, by two skinny points, and lost four times by an average of 18 points.
“But it’s one thing to say that,” Woodson said, “and another to do it. And that has to be our mission now. To prove we belong with these guys.”
Tonight, they get their first real chance. Yes, the Knicks already have a win against Miami, a convincing 104-84 stomping at the Garden on opening night, what we know now was a splendid harbinger of the kind of ball the Knicks swear to represent now. And after last night’s thrilling 100-98 escape in Charlotte, they enter tonight a half-game ahead of the Heat atop the Eastern Conference standings.
They have moved on Woodson’s mission statement.
Tonight, they get to make a lot of their new ambitions and new expectations stick, in this benchmark game against the only team worthy of measuring against in the East right now. The Knicks will be coming in for the business end of a back-to-back, but you can bet the mortgage they will not be sending Carmelo Anthony, Tyson Chandler and J.R. Smith on a plane to Chicago, mimicking the Spurs’ strategy last week.
And you also can believe they will have the Heat’s full attention, too, not only because of opening night but because the Heat have spent much of the season looking just interested enough most games to cruise by whoever is in front of them that night — a passive path that blew up in their faces Tuesday night in Washington, where they were stunned by the woeful Wizards.
“This ain’t a lesson for us,” LeBron James insisted afterward. “We’ve seen and been through everything so we don’t need a loss to be like, ‘Oh, let’s catch ourselves.’ It happens.”
Still, the hallmark of the Heat these past few years is they crave statement games like this one, not only to properly gauge where they stand against other good teams but also to remind those good teams who are also upstart good teams just how far they need to travel to meet them eye-to-eye.
So tonight, three days shy of seven months since one season ended here, another will be given a jolt of clarity. The Knicks had turned downright cartoonish by the time that series was over, between Amar’e Stoudemire’s bout with a fire extinguisher, and the Knicks’ low-rent postgame decision to treat an elimination-avoiding Game 4 win into New Year’s Eve at Times Square, to the second-class and third-rate basketball that kept their stay in the playoffs brief and unmemorable.
They arrive, by all accounts, a different team than that. By the end of business tonight, we should have a sense of just how different.