The first quarter brought recollections of the night he shattered Bernard King’s record, of another 60-point possibility.
After all, Carmelo Anthony had stated this was a “got to, have to win” game and he looked unstoppable Wednesday.
That was at the start. At the end, it looked like, well, another exercise in misery in a torturous Knicks season.
“It is a tough loss to swallow,” said Anthony who finished with 36 points but in a laborious 48:25 effort, missed seven of his final eight shots in the fourth quarter and overtime. “Just couldn’t get it done. Missed opportunities. Myself, missed opportunities. Started off overtime with a missed layup and everything just went downhill from there.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 2013-14 Knicks season in miniature. At times, so, so good. At other times, awful. Welcome to Wednesday’s 106-101 loss to the Kings who had dropped seven straight on the road, including a stinker in Cleveland on Tuesday.
Anthony sidestepped talk of coach Mike Woodson’s seemingly perilous perch, acknowledged fatigue “could have been” the cause of most of his many arctic missteps down the stretch.
After Jimmer Fredette brought the Kings back and Rudy Gay tied matters with a pull-up jumper late in the fourth quarter, Anthony went for the win on a 16-footer with 1.6 ticks left. He missed. Then he started the overtime with a seemingly easy layup. He missed. See any trend developing there? Fatigue? Not on the layup flub.
“I wasn’t really thinking about that throughout the course of the game, so whether it was fatigue or not,” Anthony said. “I don’t think fatigue had an issue when I missed that wide-open layup.That right there sticks with me.”
Anthony played the entire fourth quarter and all of the overtime. Woodson said his hands were somewhat tied when he lost Iman Shumpert going into the fourth with a hip flexor. J.R. Smith already was scratched before the game with a small fracture in his left cheekbone.
“That’s a lot of minutes,” Woodson said of Anthony’s night that included the fateful miss at the end of regulation which came after the Kings gave a foul with six seconds left. “I thought maybe he could have gone a lot quicker off the dribble with it and tried to force the issue and put it on the officials. He got the shot up and hit the back of the rim, it bounced off and we were in overtime.”