NEW ORLEANS — If he is lucky, at the end of his career, Carmelo Anthony will little note nor long remember this night, this game, this collision of bad basketball played inside the appropriately, absurdly named Smoothie King Center.
He has scored more points before. He has won bigger games before. And, if he is lucky, if his mission truly to win a championship in New York City or elsewhere, he will have bigger moments and better memories to collect in the years ahead, far more than one triumphant night in this endless slog of a season in which losses for the Knicks have blurred and blended and bled together.
And yet, inside this dilapidated old building next door to the Superdome, on the court where he nearly emerged three days earlier as the star of Stars, Anthony managed to inject something — life? Hope? Intrigue? Relevance? — into this Knicks journey we no longer have a right or reason to expect.
Yes: if you look merely at the bigger picture, this 98-91 win didn’t change much. They are still a dozen games under .500, still 3 ½ games out of the final playoff spot, and now there are just 28 games left to change the narrative. And if there truly was a trade in the works involving Iman Shumpert the fact his left knee buckled like an accordion probably scotched those plans.
“We want to win now,” Tyson Chandler said, almost pleading. “We want to make the playoffs.”
If there is a march to be made then it begins with small step, and it begins because Anthony played a game that might not have been as brilliant as his 62-point splurge against Charlotte last month but was, in truth, every bit as important.
Maybe you had to see the look on Anthony’s face in the aftermath of Tuesday night’s bone-crushing loss to Memphis. Maybe you had to hear him groan in the quiet locker room afterward before he forced himself to whisper, “We have to put this one behind us …”
And then a painful pause, as he realized just how often he had uttered that same refrain across the season’s first 53 games.
“… again.”
It was the first time all year that you could describe Anthony as defeated, as beaten and depressed and unsettled. Even in the worst of times after the worst losses, Melo has always been the upbeat anomaly, still convinced of better times ahead — to the point you wondered if he wasn’t a little delusional sometimes.
Not Tuesday. Not in the visitor’s locker room at FedEx Forum. No spin from Melo, just a few shrugs and a couple sighs.
“It was just the way we lost,” he would say almost exactly 24 hours later. “We were up five with 2 ½ to go and we gave that game away. It was like déjà vu for a lot of games we’ve had this year.”
More of that this night, too: a 13-point Knicks lead that vanished in a flash, an 89-88 lead for the Pelicans with 3:58 to go, one more desultory loss settling into the crosshairs. One more shovel of dirt prepared to bury the Knicks a little deeper.
“I didn’t want to see it skip away,” Melo said.
And he didn’t. If there has been one consistently fair criticism of Anthony’s time with the Knicks, it’s the disappearance of the clutch gene that used to be a big part of his arsenal in Denver, when he was, statistically, the most feared late-game player in the league. A force in the first quarter, a ghost in the fourth; that’s the rep now. That’s the rap.
Just not this time, not this night. He buried a 22-footer to regain the lead. When Tyreke Evans answered, he grabbed an offensive rebound and banked in a layup off an odd angle. Then there was a 12-footer, with 1:14 to go. And, lastly, a 14-footer 34 seconds later. That was that. That was enough. That was 42 points, 16-for-29 from the floor.
“He carried us home,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said.
For one night in a forgettable slog, it was something the Knicks could celebrate, something they could embrace as a team. The abyss still looms. But it was good to talk about something else for a change. That much was certain.