So just how patient are you willing to be?
Is it enough, this early in the season, for Madison Square Garden to feel the way it felt last night late in the fourth quarter, for it to sound the way it sounded, a 19-point deficit erased, the Knicks two points to the good, the Garden thick with electricity? Is it enough that the Knicks somehow made a game out of what promised to be a massacre?
Are you still at the point where you’re willing to forgive a 122-117 loss to the Warriors, where you are willing to overlook the fact that there still are wide swatches of games in which the Knicks essentially refuse to play defense; that they still are far too reliant on the 3-pointer; that Raymond Felton — for all the positive energy he has brought — still seems to have no earthly idea how to run the pick-and-roll with Amar’e Stoudemire?
Are these still forgivable offenses? How patient are you willing to be?
“I think we all believe we’re better than what we’ve been showing the last week,” guard Toney Douglas said. “Now it’s a matter of showing it to ourselves and proving it to ourselves. We need to close these games better at home.”
The Knicks are 3-5, have blown three winnable home games, and are staring at the kind of West Coast trip next week that has carved the guts and the soul out of teams of recent vintage.
A week ago tonight, they went to Chicago and bludgeoned the Bulls. They followed that with a whipping of the Wizards at the Garden.
It seemed as if there finally was a buzz building inside the Garden, finally a whiff of winning, an aroma so often missing across the past decade or so.
There were times last night when that feel-good, two-game stretch felt as if it happened years ago, when the Warriors were running tire tracks on the Knicks’ backs, blowing holes through their matador defense.
David Lee had a fine homecoming, and he received a nice hand from the crowd, but by the end of the game he was an afterthought, simply an opponent who nailed the two game-clinching foul shots and unwittingly housed the remains of one of Wilson Chandler’s teeth in his arm. Good a man as Lee is, he is as prominent a ghost of the Knicks’ past as anyone, and the Knicks desperately need to let go of that past.
A win against a very fine Warriors team would have given them that. Instead they will take a three-game losing streak to Minnesota tomorrow, with the looming danger of letting the season slip away already.
How patient are you willing to be?
“It’s frustrating because we had ourselves in position to win the game at the end, we got a lead and we couldn’t hold it,” Stoudemire said. “Good teams win games like that, especially at home. We have the ability to have a good season, and we still can. But we have to start showing it. We have to start closing out games like this one.”
Stoudemire won the game-within-a-game with Lee, but his 33 points came on only 15 shots. So much of his offense right now is self-created, and while that yields its benefits (14 free throws) he also has become a breathing turnover machine. There are plenty of things to like about the cast around him, and about Felton specifically, who brings a toughness that will be useful the deeper the Knicks get in the season.
But the fact is, Stoudemire still rolls off a pick as well as anyone on earth, and he still is used to finding a basketball on his fingertips when he makes separation. For every second of his basketball life,
Steve Nash would deliver it to him. Felton hasn’t figured that out yet. He better. You don’t hire Jerry Rice and ask Charlie Brown to get him the ball.
“We’ll get there,” Danilo Gallinari said. “I really believe that.”
The Knicks are willing to be patient. They have no choice.
Are you?
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com