Ok, show of hands:
How many of you woke up depressed this morning because the reality hit you hard, sometime around 4 in the morning, that there will never be another Knicks-Nets game in New Jersey ever again?
Anyone? Bueller?
All caps? Italics?
THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER KNICKS-NETS GAME IN NEW JERSEY. EVER. AGAIN.
Are those crickets? They must be depressed crickets because THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER KNICKS-NETS GAME IN NEW JERSEY!
EVER AGAIN!
One last time last night, the Knicks made the commute through the Holland Tunnel and were greeted by what has to have been, over the years, the greatest road-court advantage in the sport. There were 18,711 people inside Prudential Center, which made it easy: the first two numbers in front of the comma represented all the Knicks fans; the three after were all the Nets fans.
OK, OK. That’s an exaggeration. There weren’t near that many Nets fans.
We can hope this 167th and final collision between New York and New Jersey can be buried somewhere, maybe in a time capsule, maybe in the backyard behind Satriale’s Pork Store. Take with it this rivalry that never was, and perhaps when we reconvene in a year, the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Knicks can give us something we’ve never had in the franchises’ 35 years of peaceful — way too peaceful — coexistence.
A rivalry. A real, honest-to-goodness, Brooklyn-and-Manhattan-like-back-in-the-day-with-the-Dodgers-and-the-Giants passion play born out of proximity and passion and pettiness and all of the good things we hold dear in our sports rivalries.
This workaday 104-95 Knicks win was like too many that came before in the saga of Knicks-Nets: one team on the way up, another on the way out, one trying to figure itself out in time for the start of the playoffs, the other hoping to arrange a star-studded shotgun marriage before switching its address to Barclays Center.
“We jumped on them and did what we had to do from the very beginning,” Knicks interim coach Mike Woodson said when it was over, after he saw his team effortlessly seize a 21-point lead, watched it whittle to five, then saw all the Nets’ resistance melt away in perfectly neighborly fashion. “We’re playing for something. It’s still a dogfight and we have to stay in the hunt for the playoffs. We have to finish the race, get ready for the playoffs, one game at a time.”
For the Knicks, this was the kind of professional effort that was lacking earlier in the year during sleepwalks against the likes of Charlotte and New Orleans; the real interesting match for them is tomorrow, assuming all goes well at practice today and Amar’e Stoudemire is ready to report for duty in Cleveland. The Bucks lost, which means it will essentially take an act of God for the Knicks to miss the playoffs now; Philly won, but the Knicks are still a game up for the 7 seed.
Last night was simply about surviving, about taking one last trip to the Jersey side and hurrying back home without any additional injuries. And they served that mission well.
“We had business to take care of tonight and we didn’t want to get sloppy about that, didn’t want to get caught up in not playing as well as we can,” said Tyson Chandler, whose 18 points and 10 rebounds and end-to-end intensity made certain that message wasn’t lost on his teammates. “This isn’t the time to get caught napping.”
So the door on this chapter of local basketball lore would close quietly, the Knicks improving to 85-82 all-time against New Jersey, 34-48 in New Jersey. Carmelo Anthony looked as if he might write a fabulous closing act all by himself, hitting his first six shots, but he would settle for 33 and the Knicks would take it.
And could be forgiven if, on the way back through the tunnel, on the way out of Jersey for the last time, they hummed a little tune about pulling out of here to win.