This one is different. This one strikes the Knicks in a deep, dark place, a loss that isn’t as much about a lack of execution or a lack of effort, the usual suspects of this epic fail of a season to date, 17 losses now in 24 games, every light-at-the-end-of-a-tunnel moment met by a steaming locomotive, every single time.
No. This one’s different. After this calamitous 102-101 loss to the Wizards, the questions are simpler than any that have come before, speaking to the very competence of the basketball operation:
Can’t anybody here play this game?
Can’t anyone here coach this game?
Does anyone here have the slightest idea what they’re doing?
“This,” J.R, Smith said, “is a frustrating way to lose a game.”
Frustrating? Frustrating is only prologue to what this was. Frustrating barely gets you past the table of contents. It’s one thing to lose, after all. It’s something else entirely to do as many things wrong as the Knicks did in the final 24.2 seconds of this game — mental, physical, all of it, right down to a team-wide basketball IQ that barely hovers around room temperature now.
You can start with the terrible omen — Beno Udrih missing a foul shot which meant that a team that struggles to be passable on defense on its best nights was now forced to keep the Wizards off the board on one do-or-die possession.
Still, the Knicks were armed with certain advantages. They had a foul to give. They had a pretty good idea who was going to take the shot. Most important, they had three timeouts — two fulls and a 20 — if they had to stare down a worst-case scenario. They had an answer for everything. Everything except one:
A self-imposed clown show.
That foul to give? The Knicks never used it. As each of the 19,812 inside the Garden — plus, presumably, the 12 men in the huddle and the man conducting the huddle — had to assume, Bradley Beal got the ball. He raced past Udrih as if he weren’t there, so Udrih couldn’t take the foul. He reached the basket before Andrea Bargnani, among others, could impede him or take the foul.
Beal made the layup. He gave the Wizards the lead. But there was still this: There were still 6.9 seconds left. You call timeout. You regroup. You get the ball at halfcourt. And you have a star player, Carmelo Anthony, who is overdue to make one of those buzzer beaters he used to be famous for in Denver.
All is not lost.
Except all was already lost.
Think of all the NBA games you watch in the course of a season. Think of all the late-game baskets in lost-cause games. What do you see? You see a coach stalking into the floor, hands above their head, the universal signal for a timeout.
Somehow, Mike Woodson didn’t call a timeout. He had three. He left the game with three. He wakes up this morning with three. Maybe he figured he can use them if there’s traffic on the Tappan Zee one of these days?
“I probably should have taken a timeout there at the end,” Woodson would admit later, in one of the no-kidding comments you’ll ever hear. He is a good man, and has been a good coach for these Knicks but after this, after failing to get across to his team to use their foul-to-give and then freezing as the game bled away?
“We have guys who have been in the league 10, 11 years,” Smith said. “It shouldn’t all be on Coach’s shoulders.”
OK. Fine. Spread the blame around. The Knicks as a whole, top of the roster to bottom, have never exactly made you label them basketball Phi Beta Kappas. But it starts with the coach. Anthony started downcourt, hesitated (losing precious seconds) because clearly he was waiting to hear a whistle for a timeout, wound up launching a hideous off-balance 3 as the buzzer groaned, as 19,812 people frantically screamed “CALL A #$$@#$%%$ TIMEOUT!”
Nineteen thousand people knew enough to call a timeout there.
One coach didn’t. His players have been loud in their defense of him throughout these nightmarish 24 games, but what good is any of that? How do you defend a coach who oversees those final 24.2 seconds?
Here’s the thing: You can’t. Not after this. If the ax is coming, the ax is deserved, and it’s impossible to act surprised if and when it does. It was that bad. It was worse than that bad. Losing is one thing. This was different.