NBA

It won’t show up in boxscore, but Thomas saved banged-up Knicks

SALT LAKE CITY — Maybe it was the fact that for a portion of yesterday morning, Kurt Thomas thought he had a stress fracture in his foot, a diagnosis that would certainly have ended his season and, at 40 years old, maybe his career, too.

So if it looked last night like Thomas was playing the game as if it were the last time he’d ever play the game … well, there was reason for that. Thomas undoubtedly spent much of the day wondering if he’d already played his final game. The X-rays showed a bone spur.

And the old man figured: What the hell. Let’s play ball.

“They don’t make that breed anymore,” J.R. Smith said, shaking his head.

Thomas, of course, reaches back to a time when toughness was as much a basketball asset as ups, when sneering through a bruise or a bump was a sign of deep commitment, respect for the game, for honoring your job by doing your job.

So don’t look at the boxscore for evidence of how Thomas rescued the Knicks last night as they salvaged the final game of this five-game western swing, beating the Jazz 90-83 — unless you notice the three blocked shots he collected, or the 26 minutes and 47 seconds he played, or the three charges he drew.

Look instead at the way he elevated his bloodied team, missing its three best players, a loss away from sinking into a first-place tie with the Nets. Look at what he meant to them: They actually voted him a game ball for the effort, which was perfect of course, a high-school gesture for a guy who was last in high school during George H.W. Bush’s Administration.

“Kurt played 26 minutes?” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said with a laugh. “I can’t remember the last time Kurt probably played 26 minutes.”

But he had to, because the only bigs left for the Knicks right now are him and Kenyon Martin and Marcus Camby, and there isn’t a young set of legs in the bunch. The Jazz are huge up front, they have terrific big men in Al Jefferson and Paul Millsap and Derrick Favors, and yet none of them could emerge with any kind of dominance.

All three of the Knicks’ big men get credit for that. But Thomas wound up going above and beyond, mostly because of the pain regularly barking from his right foot.

“Once the ball is in the air,” he would say, “you don’t notice it as much.”

But it was impossible not to notice what Thomas was doing. For long swaths of this season, Thomas has been anchored to the bench, going weeks at a time when the only action he saw on the floor was generating a sweat during pregame warm-ups with the other reserves.

It was fair to wonder: What in the world had the Knicks done, besides reaching back to the 1999 team photo and returning one of the faces of that conference-championship team to his old home. Woodson, as far back as January, said: “I believe that every one of the guys we have here will win a game or two for us, even the ones you don’t expect.”

Last night, Thomas won the Knicks a game, helped end a losing streak, grinding up and down the floor on an injured wheel and 40-year-old lungs, exchanging pleasantries with the courtside denizens at Energy Solutions Arena, playing like it was the last game of his life because, hell, who knows what the MRI machine will reveal when he enters the tube today.

“There’s a lot of character in that man,” Jason Kidd said.

He shook his head and smiled, one old man to another. On Saturday, Kidd will join him among the 40-somethings but for now, Thomas is the elder statesman, the one who walked into the dressing room last night and had a surprise waiting for him on the top shelf of his locker: an old-school black phone, maybe one of the oldest relics his teammates could find that was older than Thomas.

“Not sure who put that there,” Thomas said, with a smile that said: who cares? And why not? For one more night at least, Kurt Thomas reminded a lot of people why they love this game so much. Starting with the other 11 guys in the room.