So of course there would be one more wide-open Hawk at the end, because so much of the night had featured various Knicks keeping their distance from various Hawks, treating the Hawks as if they had the flu, or worse, not wanting to get too close, avoiding their germs, just in case.
Of course the ball would bounce off Carmelo Anthony’s hand in the final seconds, the seconds melting away and the Garden crowd anxiously hoping that maybe, just maybe, this would be the possession when the Knicks would choose to guard someone, anyone, anyone at all.
Ah, but even when they did, even when they forced Jeff Teague to make a bad pass — right at Melo! — Anthony could only tip it away, knock it in the general direction of Josh Smith who was absolutely, positively completely …
“Wide open,” Anthony said. “He was wide open.”
So Smith lined it up, saw the Knicks’ J.R. Smith somehow respond by actually backing farther away, as if the two Smiths had opposite magnetic charges and it was impossible for J.R. to get any closer to Josh. It was that kind of night, almost an ABA night missing only the red, white and blue ball, the Knicks shooting 54 percent, the Hawks shooting 60 percent, a breezy lunchtime run at the Y.
“Not my favorite kind of game,” Tyson Chandler, who knows offensive defense when he sees it, said later on.
Still, the Knicks were a stop away from grinding out a win on a night when stops were as rare as ceviche. The Hawks — specifically Josh Smith — had been generous to a fault in the final moments, a backcourt violation and an offensive charge and, finally, a foul as Anthony was dashing to the basket, an old-school 3-point play that gave Anthony 42 points and the Knicks a 106-104 lead with 12.5 seconds left.
And now, time bleeding away, the ball was in the air.
“We got a good look at it,” Hawks coach Larry Drew said.
Actually, everyone did, because Smith, a lefty, let fly a long, looping, high-arching shot that seemed destined to scrape the pinwheel ceiling before coming down.
“The longest shot I ever looked at,” Anthony said.
He shook his head.
“I thought he was going to bank that in,” he said.
Not this time. It was the Hawks’ 65th shot of the night and only their 26th miss, and as it bounded away it lowered their shooting percentage from .609 to .600 on the dot, and you can watch a thousand basketball games and only get a handful where the losing team makes six of every 10 it takes.
And if it seems like we’re spending a lot of time talking about open Hawks and porous defense and things that go swish in the night, well, part of that is because Knicks coach Mike Woodson seemed positively unmoved by what he’d seen.
“They shot 60 but we shot 54,” he said, all but shrugging his shoulders. “That’s a very good offensive team.”
Sure, they’re OK, but they aren’t the ’72 Lakers, they aren’t the ’86 Celtics, they aren’t the ’96 Bulls. But they sure looked like them against that defense. The Knicks won because the Hawks have a team-wide knucklehead gene that tends to surface at inopportune times — unless you’re the Knicks, in which case the timing couldn’t have been better.
Look, you can win games in the NBA any way you want and they all count the same, and the Knicks are in a stretch where they badly need to pile up as many wins as possible before the schedule stiffens a bit in February. And after barely punching their time cards Saturday night in Philadelphia, they weren’t going to hand it back.
Besides, even if they wanted to, the Hawks wouldn’t have let them.
“We were not willing to lose tonight,” Chandler said, and that’s a fine sentiment, bolstered by a scorching-hot night from Melo (a franchise-tying nine 3s), another productive night from Amar’e Stoudemire (18 points, eight rebounds) and an encouraging game from Raymond Felton (12 points, 10 assists).
Still, at some point, Woodson is going to have to re-introduce his team to the other side of the floor. That was always supposed to be a point of emphasis for him, and for them. Lately, it’s barely a point of concern. They got away with one last night. They shouldn’t get used to it.