Here’s the thing to remember about J.R. Smith: Whenever you think he’s as cold as Buffalo in January … well, he knows that. Whenever you wonder if he’s ever going to make another shot — or if he’s ever going to take another good shot — he’s asking himself the same thing, only with even choicer language.
“You always have to remember something,” Smith said last night. “In basketball you aren’t going to make every shot.”
He paused a beat.
“But you aren’t going to miss every shot, either.”
Honestly, is that a great rule to live by, or what? Across the first 24 minutes of what became a 118-110 Knicks victory over the Celtics last night, Smith took nine 3-point shots and made seven of them.
He would finish with 25 points and six assists in nearly 36 minutes, and with fellow gunner Steve Novak (25 points on 8-for-10 from the floor, all from beyond the arc) provided a glimpse of what has become an absolute Knicks strength, a bench that nobody could have seen 114 days earlier, on opening day, Christmas Day, the last time Boston had visited.
On that day — a 106-104 Knicks nail-biter victory — Novak never once removed his sweatpants, never once stepped on the floor. And 7,000 miles away, Smith was scoring 36 points — including, interestingly, 7-for-9 from 3 — as the Zhejiang Chouzhou Bank Cyclones beat the Jilin Northeast Tigers 100-88 in a Chinese Basketball Association game.
Yet now, on the doorstep of a playoff tournament, the Knicks are all but assured a spot in, they now have a second unit that, when it’s on — and it’s hard to be more on than they were last night — offers a legitimate supporting player to Carmelo Anthony. Even on a night when Melo turned in his first triple-double as a Knick — 35 points, 12 rebounds, 10 assists — the bench ruled the Garden buzz.
“Everything we do is based on Melo,” Novak said. “And not just when he plays as great as he did [last] night. The last couple of games, whenever I’d pass up an open shot, he’d take me aside. ‘You have to take those, every time,’ he told me. And when your leader tells you that, it has to make you feel good.”
He chuckled.
“And it’s not like you ever have to ask a shooter twice to shoot the ball.”
No, neither Novak nor Smith is what you would describe as shy, even if you couldn’t find two more dissimilar players. Yet Smith, the straight-from-high-school athletic freak and Novak, the four-year Marquette letterman, have forged the kind of chemistry that might only be possible during a season like this 66-games-in-125-days gallop from start to finish.
“He is the best 3-point shooter in our league,” Smith said of Novak. “It’s not even close.”
“He’s always looking to set me up, always seems to know where I am on the floor,” Novak said of Smith. “And because he’s such a great shooter in his own right it opens things up for me dramatically.”
Of course, this was a night when the two of them couldn’t possibly have been hotter, or more productive. It isn’t always that way. Novak was shut out from beyond the 3-point line in back-to-back games against the Bulls last week in his first prolonged shooting slump of the year. And Smith has had more than a couple of games when the buzz at the Garden isn’t the anticipatory pre-roar both enjoyed last night, but 19,763 people screaming, in unison, “NOOOOOOOOOO!”
But Smith, the shooting philosopher, had an answer for that, too.
“You don’t know if you’re gonna make a shot unless you take the shot,” he said. “So you might as well take it.”
On nights like this, those are words to live by for the Knicks. In the weeks ahead, they may well be words to survive by. Anthony is playing at a level few Knicks have ever sniffed. Maybe Amar’e Stoudemire is back Friday. After that? It’s good to know the Knicks’ gunners are ready to step up. They may not always make them.
But be sure of this: They’ll take them.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com