MEMPHIS, Tenn. — It was time. It was past time. All season long the Knicks had been the team to squander leads and surrender basketball games at home. All season long the Knicks were the gang that couldn’t shoot straight in the end, playing the final minutes of games like petrified schoolkids.
Now it was their time to embrace a moment, and maybe launch themselves into the playoff hunt almost in spite of themselves. They’d already erased an 18-point deficit. They’d already handed away a seven-point lead that was still five with just over two minutes left.
And then Tim Hardaway Jr. knocked down a brass-knuckle 3, restoring a two-point lead with 1:04 left, allowing the Knicks a chance to steal precisely the kind of game they need to make a habit of stealing across the next two months.
“It’s in our hands to close that game out,” J.R. Smith said.
“When you come back like we came back,” Carmelo Anthony said, “you have to finish it off.”
Ah, but if there is one thing the Knicks do better than any team in the NBA, maybe better than any team in the world, it is this: They find a way to always — that’s not hyperbole; always — leave an opponent’s best shooter so wide open at inopportune times, that shooter is practically depressed from loneliness.
So it would be again. It wasn’t an ill-advised double team this time; this time it was Smith seeing Mike Conley cut down the lane, and instinct — bad instinct — took over. He followed Conley. He left Mike Miller alone. At this point in his career, there is one thing and one thing only that Mike Miller does well: He makes open 3-point jump shots.
And, man, was he open. Pablo Prigioni lunged, but it was too late. By the time the ball splashed though the net, the Grizzlies were up 94-93. They would win, 98-93. One more loss for the Knicks, now 13 games under .500, now 3 ½ games behind the eight seed, now one more day closer to the abyss.
“We had a defensive lapse,” Mike Woodson said. “It cost us. Up two, a two doesn’t hurt us.”
He shook his head.
“But a 3 kills you.”
Who do you blame there? The coach? Woodson told the Knicks not to double, told them not to switch, but this is also a coach that for three years has drilled the double, drilled the switch. Do you blame the players? Smith conceded he had something of a sick feeling seeing Miller, his original man, so open — “That’s a bad job of rotating” — but added, “You just want to make sure you block out, in case he misses.”
But of course Miller didn’t miss. When a culture of losing engulfs a team as completely as it has these Knicks in this season, it almost never loosens its grip. When 3 ½ months of ineptitude become a part of your team-wide DNA, it’s rarely a matter of if you’ll slip on banana peels at the worst possible time, but how. A fluke rebound? An un-called time-out? A missed buzzer beater?
Pick your poison.
“This is a game we needed to win,” Woodson said, his voice soft, his mood somber.
Look, even good teams can suffer breakdowns. All the Spurs needed to do last June was make sure they didn’t allow the Heat to attempt a 3-pointer up three, seconds away from winning the championship. What did they do? They allowed Ray Allen — maybe the most clutch 3-point chucker of all time — to take, and make, a 3. And the Spurs are everyone’s consensus pick as the smartest kids in class.
It happens, sure.
But it happens more to teams like the Knicks, teams who have lost their way, who talk of doing big things with the final 29 games of the season but have yet to show even a passing grasp of the little things that allow you to function with a reasonable level of competence from game to game.
And even Woodson, who has grasped for any positive spin from every one of the Knicks’ 33 losses, couldn’t muster the strength for that this time. Was it a splendid comeback? Sure. It was also a disgrace how disinterested the Knicks looked in falling behind by 18 in the first place.
And they knew it.
“All I saw,” Anthony said, “was Mike Miller wide open.”
And all he could taste was one more opportunity lost, one more game lost to the wind. Add it to the pile. Add it to the list.