MIAMI — He knew the number. Are you kidding? Carmelo Anthony has played thousands of basketball games that count, thousands of games where someone was etching rows of 2s and 3s and X’s next to his name in a green-and-white scorebook. You can score a lot of points for a lot of years and one thing never changes. You always have an idea just how many.
“I knew,” he would say. “I knew I had 48.”
He also didn’t appear to want any part of the basketball in the closing moments of the Knicks’ 102-90 victory over the Heat. Part of it was practical — “Let’s just let this end,” he said, speaking of the Knicks’ 47th win of the season, their ninth in a row, their third in four games against players wearing “MIAMI” on their jerseys.
And part of it went unspoken: maybe it’s best not to poke the bear when he’s resting. Maybe it’s best to take the gift the Heat had given them — no LeBron, no Wade, no Mario Chalmers — and just sprint for the bus, to the airport, hurry along to Atlanta, where they will play the Hawks tonight.
Once the Heat reduced the game to an exhibition, there was nothing to be gained but cold, unemotional arithmetic: add one to the win total. Subtract one from the magic number for clinching the Atlantic Division, which now sits at 5. The best solution for a no-win game? Win the damn thing anyway. The Knicks were going to do that.
But Melo’s teammates wanted something else.
“Come on!” Ray Felton yelled at him. “Come get it.”
So he got it. There were 20 seconds left when Anthony let it fly from 19 feet, 19.2 seconds left when the 49th and 50th points splashed cleanly through, and the sizeable contingent of Knicks fans among the 20,300 inside AmericanAirlines Arena were audibly as satisfied as the Knicks, who smiled and celebrated a splendid end to a spectacular night.
“Incredible,” said Tyson Chandler, returning after missing two weeks with a bad neck. “Just incredible.”
“Carmelo had a hell of a game,” said Miami’s Shane Battier, who had a good look at just about all of it when he was on the floor.
“Unbelievable,” coach Mike Woodson said. “He refused to let us lose tonight. He made big plays and big shots. Some things come easy for great players and tonight he did everything he was supposed to do to put is in position to win.”
Anthony himself seemed almost bashful by what he had done, appreciative for the night spent on an impossibly hot roll, happy for the win and his place in it. But he’s a smart player and a smarter person: he understood a couple of things right away: The Heat were hobbled.
And as wonderful as the numbers are — and they were spectacular, 18-for-26 shooting, 7-for-10 from 3 and zero turnovers — they happened on April the 2nd, in the 73rd game of the regular season, not on June the 2nd, in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals. Melo isn’t a kid anymore. He knows all scoring 50 last night will do, in so many precincts, is emphasize his chops as a scorer. His opening act closes in nine games and two weeks.
The real marking period begins April 22.
“My mindset was going to be the same whether they played or not,” Anthony said, and it showed, and it didn’t hurt that he made his first seven shots, or that he kept his pace going for four quarters, finally burying the Heat with a 16-foot jumper and a 23-foot 3 that turned a two-point game into a seven-point game.
The Knicks were going to win, and nobody was going to much care, even if the same depleted Heat had walked into San Antonio a couple of days ago and knocked off the Western Conference leaders just for kicks and giggles. Anthony was going to become one of the most reluctant 50-point scorers you’ll ever see. And they would all sprint for the bus, and the plane.
“We got another one tomorrow,” he said. “Let’s go.”