INDIANAPOLIS — The room was as quiet as you would want it to be. You weren’t suffering alone last night when the shots stopped falling and the season started sputtering and the game veered irretrievably south.
Wherever you watched the Knicks tumble into the abyss — living room, man cave, saloon — that quiet was matched here, inside the visitor’s locker room at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, maybe 25 minutes after the final horn brought a close to this game, Pacers 106, Knicks 99, and these Eastern Conference semifinals, Pacers 4, Knicks 2.
“It’s tough to go out this way,” coach Mike Woodson said at the same time the doors to this funereal room were opened. “We had our chances.”
There was little consolation in that in here. Tyson Chandler sat on a stool, staring straight ahead, his right wrist thickly wrapped. Kenyon Martin stared coldly into his stall. Amar’e Stoudemire shoveled food into his mouth, shaking his head periodically, and Chris Copeland couldn’t yet bring himself to peel off his blue uniform.
“Lots of emotion right now,” Ray Felton said after playing one of his worst games of the year, shooting a shocking 0-for-7 from the floor. “It’s going to be a long summer, but we have to keep this in our hearts and minds as we work out and train. It hurts right now.”
This wasn’t a typical business-as-usual professional locker room, no we’ll-be-back platitudes, not yet. This was a hurting room. They know this season ends earlier than they wanted, and expected, and there’s no telling what the landscape of the Eastern Conference will look like next year when Rajon Rondo comes back, when Derrick Rose comes back, with the Heat forever loitering above everyone.
“We were right there,” said Chandler, the most disappointing Knick in this series, who either played through a great deal of pain or caused even more if he didn’t. “We just couldn’t close the deal. Not tonight. Not in this series.”
Across the room, Carmelo Anthony’s eyes looked glazed and weary as he sat slumped on a chair, his left shoulder wrapped in a huge pillow of ice, his knees iced down, his feet restlessly tapping a pair of red and blue flip-flops.
His night had been an assortment of testimony for everyone: for his acolytes, he had been brilliant for three quarters, the only reason the Knicks were even in the game when they finally launched their run. In the third quarter, he and the ascendant Iman Shumpert scored 31 of the Knicks’ 34 points as they caught and passed the Pacers in a brilliant, desperate flurry.
And for the Other Crowd … well, it was hard to deny the 0-for-5 start Anthony had in the fourth, every one of the shots capable of giving the Knicks a bigger cushion. There was no denying the game-turning moment, up two, when he soared to the rim for a dunk and ran into Roy Hibbert’s hand instead.
“That block spearheaded their momentum,” Anthony said.
And there were the three shattering turnovers, notably the giveaway that resulted in Lance Stephenson’s breakaway and three-point play, permanently breaking the tie, permanently elevating the Pacers.
“We just didn’t make the plays coming down the stretch,” Woodson said.
In truth, those final few minutes of the fourth quarter were a direct result of their inability to close out the Celtics when they should have. They lost Game 1 after a day and a half of rest, started chasing that game right there and never could quite get it back. Game 1 is what will haunt this team every bit as much as Game 6.
“This,” J.R. Smith said (before declaring he wanted to retire a Knick), “is gonna sting.”
It will. The coach was also right when he said, “To walk away and say this was a disaster … absolutely not,” but there was no mistaking the sense of loss in his locker room. Things broke awfully well for the Knicks this year in assembling 54 wins and a division title and the first postseason series win in 13 years.
Maybe they wouldn’t have been good enough, or healthy enough, to give the Heat a real challenge across the next two weeks. But they sure wanted to find out.
And never got there.
“Frustrating,” Melo called it later, after he had shed his ice packs and left an empty locker room and started the long, long journey toward Next Year, suddenly one with Knicks fans who now have 40 Next Years, and counting, in their collection.