Carmelo Anthony (Charles Wenzelberg)
CAN’T WIN ’EM ALL: Carmelo Anthony (inset) and the Knicks walk down the court in the final minute of overtime in yesterday’s 97-90 loss to the Celtics in Game 4 of their first-round playoff series. (Charles Wenzelberg (2))
BOSTON — Afterward, the Celtics spoke about the burden that lies heavy on the Knicks’ shoulders, which is exactly what they should have done. That’s the price of history, after all, the permanent tax incurred by what happened on other fields, in that other sport, almost nine years ago.
“All the pressure is on them,” Jeff Green said when this 97-90 gem of an overtime thriller was in the books, as the happy home fans flooded North Station and the aggravated Knicks fans started pondering the long drive home on the Mass Pike. “All we have to do is keep playing hard and keep fighting and we can hopefully get back in this series. But they’re the ones who are a game away.”
Yes, and that’s why the Knicks still have to like where they sit in this series, still up three games to one despite their inability to steal this one, in which they trailed by 20 and then led by two before Kevin Garnett reached back to 2007 or so for a 20-footer that tied the game and forced OT.
Green was doing his best to play the part of Kevin Millar, who, in 2004, with another Boston team famously trailing another New York team three games to none, had defiantly warned the Yankees, before Game 4, “Don’t let the Red Sox win this game. DO NOT LET the Red Sox win this game!”
And if things break a certain way, maybe that Garnett jumper late in regulation — which bought the Celtics the extra five minutes they needed to recover and recuperate — can serve as the basketball version of Dave Roberts’ bottom-of-the-ninth steal against Mariano Rivera, the ignition that invited one epic comeback and one historic collapse a couple of miles away from TD Garden, over at Fenway Park, October of 2004.
But there’s a lot of basketball between here and there, a lot of hard road and hard work between the Knicks trying and failing to close out Game 4 and the Celtics duplicating what the Red Sox did once upon a time — and what no NBA team has ever done, erasing a 3-0 deficit in a best-of-seven.
“Those guys are a veteran team, well-coached, and they have a lot of pride,” Knicks guard Raymond Felton said. “The fact we came back shows a lot about our team. We’re going back home. That’s back in our comfort zone, back at our home. We got what we wanted, got one game, even though we would’ve liked to get two.”
The Knicks hardly looked like a devastated team as they dressed and prepared to head home for two idle days before getting a chance to close the Celtics out at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday. For so much of the afternoon they looked like they already had sent their hearts and their attention spans back to New York ahead of the team charter, falling behind by 20 early in the third quarter, Carmelo Anthony well on the way to missing 25 shots, the bench punchless with J.R. Smith back at the hotel sitting out a one-game suspension.
They seemed resigned to playing a Game 5.
And then in the space of a few remarkable minutes, they looked poised to keep the Garden dark Wednesday night. Felton was the biggest reason, playing as brilliant a game as he has in either of his tours with the Knicks, pouring in 24 points. And Iman Shumpert was doing his part, too: 12 points, 12 rebounds, two blocks, two steals.
Somehow, down 20 became up two inside of a minute to go.
“I thought we were going to get it done,” said Anthony (36 points, but 10-for-35 from the floor). “The other guys, they did an incredible job putting us in position to win.”
But these are the Celtics, and we have read all the poems and purple prose about how tough they are, how proud, and it all applies, and it all applied yesterday. Garnett made another big shot in OT before Jason Terry, another vet with a ring in his collection, took over and crushed it the rest of the way.
“We had enough tonight,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said. “We didn’t make the plays coming down the homestretch and they did. They play hard, too. They’re battle-tested.”
And unless things go very wrong the day after tomorrow, it was a fine last hurrah. Boston will try its best to channel 2004, and New York will do its best to ignore it, and it still shouldn’t matter. But you can’t blame them for trying.