The shot was off, you could see that, and at the same time you could see and you could feel a thousand other things, too: Visions of past losses, past collapses, a deep sense of foreboding. The Knicks had been up 15 after three quarters, and against a reeling team like the Pistons, that ought to be plenty.
But there is nothing less sure about these Knicks than a sure thing, we know that by now, we’ve seen it plenty, we’ve seen how they behave when games are there to be won, when opportunities are there to be seized. We’ve seen how slippery their fingers are when it comes to wrapping them around a few ounces of prosperity.
“We let our foot off the gas a little bit,” Carmelo Anthony would sheepishly admit, and that was about to cost them, of course it was. Raymond Felton had just missed a free throw, the lead was only two, the Pistons were going to call time out and they were going to get an open 3 (because everyone does against the Knicks when they really need one) and they were going to send another crowd stumbling out of the Garden and into the bitter night and …
And it didn’t happen. The Pistons are the best offensive rebounding team in the NBA. The Knicks are the worst. And yet Kenyon Martin got his fingers on the rebound, and then Anthony got his paws on the ball, and the look on the Pistons’ faces was priceless and told the story better than a full thesaurus could.
The look on the Knicks’ faces?
“We won the game,” Anthony said when this 89-85 victory was official. “That’s all that matters.”
“A win,” Mike Woodson said, “is a win.”
It’s trite, sure, it’s a little stale, yes, and it’s a lot too simplistic, we certainly can agree about that. But the Knicks haven’t yet reached a point in this season where they can distinguish a good win from a bad win, where the difference even matters. It’s likely they never will get there this year, not with so much ground to make up.
So they will take this, and they won’t mind at all if you call this 3-1 stretch over the past four games a “hot streak” as they prepare to play the Heat for the first time Thursday night. They certainly will do their best to talk themselves into believing that handing the Pistons a fifth straight loss without Tyson Chandler is something more than it really is.
“We’re building something here,” Anthony said at game’s end. “We’re building our confidence, building our swagger back, it’s something we’ve been missing this season.”
Said Woodson: “Sometimes it becomes contagious. You win a few close games and you remember how you win them. I always said there is a fine line in close games between winning and losing.”
And then, tellingly, he added this: “We’ve been on the other end plenty. Sometimes you have to get lucky.”
The Knicks weren’t lucky building that 15-point lead after 36 minutes; that one was all a product of maybe their finest 12-minute stretch of the season in the third, which included just about everything they need to succeed: back-to-back-to-back 3s from a scorching-hot Melo; terrific ball movement; active and pro-active defense; superb work on the glass.
This is what makes this such a perfectly mystifying game; this was the same exact team that did everything short of calling CCNY’s old plays in the final few minutes of the game, three straight trips down the floor that included two turnovers from Felton and one especially delightful tour-de-force from Melo who dribbled for 20 seconds, drove blindly to the basket, and committed an offensive foul with the Knicks up 1.
The groan that followed?
You know that’s the sound Melo took away from this game, more than any of the cheers and chants that accompanied his 13-for-24, 6-for-7-from-3 performance. Because that’s the soundtrack of this Knicks season so far: a steady hum of worry, punctuated by spectacular bursts of self-fulfilling prophecies of doom.
Luckily for the Knicks, sometimes you run into a team that’s scuffling even worse than you are. When you’re desperate for every win you can get, that’s almost as satisfying as playing well. But they shouldn’t get used to it. Varsity game coming Thursday.