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MIAMI — The Knicks get two useful gifts out of a long night alongside Biscayne Bay. The first is immediate: an All-Star break that couldn’t come at a better time, five straight days without a game on the schedule, eight of the next nine days dark, a time of rest and healing and practice, a time to re-launch and reboot.
The second is a bit more complicated and long-term: Suddenly, competely, they understand fully what it is to play at the NBA’s most rarefied level. That is the service the Heat provide to almost everyone they’ve played on the way to a 27-7 record at the break. They carry the NBA flag now: offense, defense, explosiveness, athleticism.
They are the team you measure yourself against if you want to be anything more than an amusing spring sideshow. The Knicks aren’t near there yet. Maybe they already knew that. But the Heat made sure to hammer the point home all across this thorough 102-88 beating.
“There are a handful of teams that will get better after the break,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said later on. “This is one of them.”
Spoelstra was being gracious, but if the Knicks take advantage of the week ahead and the weeks that follow, they could also make him a prophet. The frenetic surge of the early stage of the Jeremy Lin Experience has receded ever so slightly. The winning streak is over. The Knicks close the first half at 17-18, far worse than they expected on Dec. 31, far better than they ever could have hoped on Jan. 31.
“The Heat set the bar for us,” Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni said.
He’s right. Lin was dreadful last night, 1-for-11 from the floor, eight turnovers against three assists, and for the first time we got a sharp glimpse of The Other Side, of what the skeptics and cynics who have been treated like hacks and heathens might have seen in Lin when they didn’t predict automatic stardom for him.
We’ve seen enough of Lin by now to know the Heat’s backcourt was going to be a difficult challenge anyway, tired legs or not, but we’ve also seen enough to know the difference between a bad game from a bad way.
Still, it was an eye-opening performance. With Lin unable to penetrate — at least three times, he was either stripped clean or had the ball wrestled away like a big brother taunting a kid brother — and looking scattered, what we saw out of the Knicks was a return to old habits, only this time instead of Toney Douglas listlessly draining the clock and feeding Carmelo Anothony in the post, it was Lin.
The blame wasn’t on Anthony when Douglas was doing it, and it wasn’t on him last night, a pedestrian 7-for-20 shooting night that looked like a carbon copy of any of a half-dozen games out of January. Opponents aren’t dumb. They may not all be able to throw waves of amoeba defenders at the Knicks the way the Heat can, but they’ll sure give it a try almost every night.
Lin has to respond to that, and not by sneaking up on anyone; those days are done. The suspicion here is that he will, that he’s — Spoelstra’s words — a “clever player,” and smart enough to realize that it’s on him to figure out an alternate way to run the team when his usual stand-bys aren’t there.
“It’s not fatigue,” Lin said. “Everyone’s tired. It’s a tight 66-game schedule. You just have to deal with it.”
He could probably use the next couple days off, but he’ll participate in the early stages of All-Star weekend, then spend a few days of R & R, and then get back to the business of making the Knicks matter again.
The Knicks? They get the Cavaliers out of the break and then a killer Boston/Dallas/San Antonio/Milwaukee road swing. Nine of their first 12 games come against teams currently inside the playoff cut line. Spoelstra had better be right. They’d better be better. It starts with Lin. But it extends everywhere. The Knicks have served us a few tasty appetizers.
Starting in five days, we’re going to need to see a little more than that. And then a lot more.