The Ball splashed cleanly through the twine, and Paul Pierce shook his fist, and with that arrived the kind of silence that hadn’t visited Madison Square Garden for a basketball game in years.
The Garden has seen awful basketball in that time, woeful basketball, banana peels strewn everywhere, meaningless games, angry crowds, lousy players.
It hadn’t sounded like this for a long, long time. This was Michael quiet. Reggie quiet. The kind of quiet when Charles Smith was missing layups, the kind of quiet when Patrick Ewing missed his finger roll, the kind of quiet, if you really want to hop in the time machine, when Bill Bradley’s corner jumper at the buzzer missed against the Bullets in ’71.
That kind of quiet.
“We got down,” Carmelo Anthony would say, “and we knew we were going to have to will our way back.”
They were down seven, a minute and change left in the third quarter, and you could hear a season deflating amid the funereal still of 19,033 silenced voice boxes. All of the ghosts and goblins inhabiting the anxieties of Knicks fans, the ones wearing Celtics green, were tap-dancing on the Garden floor.
Ballroom-dancing on the nerves of the true believers.
But there is an equal and opposite reaction to all of that, and the Knicks were about to uncover that across the game’s final 13 1/2 minutes, and they were going to reach back to a different Garden era to make all of that happen. Pierce’s 3 made the score 70-63; the C’s would score exactly eight more points the rest of the way.
Not only were Jason Kidd and Kenyon Martin and J.R. Smith disrupting them, it felt like Anthony Mason, Charles Oakley and Derek Harper were out there, too. Not only were the Celtics succumbing to that defensive purge, they suddenly had something else to contend with.
And there was this: the best player on the floor was playing, again, like the best player on the floor. It’s something the Knicks already have grown accustomed to, something that can never be overstated at this point of the calendar: if you have the best player, and if he’s making big plays, things are going to fall in your favor more often than not.
Once upon a time it was a magician named Clyde, and later it was a stubborn basketball tower named Patrick. Now it is Melo. And with the Knicks slipping and sputtering, with the Garden wheezing, Melo made the biggest shot of the year (so far), a 10-footer that instantly sliced the deficit to five and performed CPR on both his teammates and the grandstand.
And in the fourth quarter, he was even better: eight points, three rebounds, 4-for-5 shooting from the field, and one magnificent pass to Kenyon Martin that iced the game late. Go ahead and snicker about that being his only assist of the game, which finally ended as a gritty 85-78 win for the home team.
Just understand this: The Knicks don’t win this game without him. And now get used to saying that two or three more times in this series, and maybe another seven or eight times the rest of the spring. “That,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said, “is what the great ones do. They figure it out.”
Melo figured it out. He made his first four shots, then four of his last five, and in between he was an unsightly 5-for-20, but he was still the one demanding the ball in the fourth quarter, still the one making high-leverage shots despite the best efforts of Boston’s Jeff Green to stunt and suffocate him.
He was still the one rescuing the Knicks from matching Boston’s offensive haplessness on a night when Smith missed 12 shots and Ray Felton missed eight and Chris Copeland was afflicted with a serious case of stage fright, and Tyson Chandler didn’t even attempt a single shot in 20 1/2 minutes. You can question all you like the necessity of having a cold-blooded star down the stretch in December or February if you want.
Just not April and beyond.
“Boston knows Melo,” Woodson said. “And knows he’s not going anywhere.”
New York knows that as well. And ought to be grateful for that reality for every night this playoff spring survives.