The chants that came later on, the ones that exhorted Donnie Walsh to go get Carmelo Anthony, were telling enough. But they were brief, and they were fleeting, and they died quickly as most of the fans who were chanting Anthony’s name already were heading toward the train station, toward the parking garages, having seen enough of the Clippers’ knee-capping of the Knicks.
It was the other faintly familiar sound that lingered long after the game was over, long after Mike D’Antoni was finished ripping his players and Amar’e Stoudemire was done exhorting his teammates. It was a hum we haven’t really heard in a while, not the way it sounded Wednesday night.
“I heard them,” Landry Fields admitted.
“It was hard not to hear them,” Stoudemire conceded.
Yes, booing returned in force to Madison Square Garden in the Knicks’ 51st game of the season, and while it’s always an unsettling thing to hear in your own building, it also was a sign of how far the Knicks have come in those 51 games. Sure, there were boos audible intermittently across the past 10 years, but those were boos of boredom, of indifference, of diffidence, of not really knowing what else to do, what else to say.
These were boos of frustration, of disappointment, of anger.
These were boos of a fan base that figures that five-eighths of a season is long enough to keep offering thanksgiving for not being a laughingstock any longer. In some ways, they were boos that should fall gently on the ears of Knicks players, of Knicks brass, because they are boos that were intended to send a direct message:
Don’t think — don’t ever think — that the bar has been permanently lowered.
And efforts like the one against the Clippers won’t be tolerated with a smile and a pat on the back. Knicks fans may love their team, love the fact that it’s relevant again, love the Knicks’ emergence as a (mostly) watchable product night after night this season. And for 50 games, the fans held their restlessness in check.
In game No. 51, with another loss looming to a lesser team, with another chance to prove to the world that they can afford to not get Anthony if it turns out that way, the Knicks instead issued a 48-minute cry for help. They earned their coach’s wrath, their superstar’s dismay, and their fans’ fury.
“[They] had a right to be angry,” Raymond Felton said at the Knicks’ practice facility yesterday. “We didn’t play with any type of energy or alertness. [They] had a right to be angry. I was angry.”
Anger is good. But anger isn’t enough. For two years, Knicks fans waded through game after meaningless game and were sold a promise that the wait would be worth it. For three months, they were mostly rewarded for that. But the truth is, if the Lakers do what they’re expected to do tonight and humble the Knicks, the Knicks will be precisely where they ought to be, if you think about it: 26 wins, 26 losses.
That’s about right. The Knicks weren’t as bad as they looked in starting the season 3-8. They weren’t as good as they looked when they promptly won 13 of their next 14. What they are, right now, is something in the middle: capable of winning a game against the Spurs and the Heat now and again, capable of losing to the Clippers and the Suns and the Kings, at home.
Maybe .500 would’ve been acceptable and agreeable in November. But the Knicks have taunted and teased. They’ve elevated the bar. And Anthony is still available, affecting every Knicks conversation and clearly altering their play, as D’Antoni admitted.
“You hate it for the players,” he said. “At the same time, it’s part of the business. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
The Knicks get the Lakers at home tonight, the Nets tomorrow, then play exactly one game in 10 days, a scheduling quirk that suddenly seems like the perfect time to reboot the season — preferably with a star wingman for Stoudemire, certainly with a renewed sense of purpose for everyone else. Not being awful simply isn’t good enough anymore.
michael.vaccaro
@nypost.com