SWEET MELO-DY: Carmelo Anthony is pumped up after making a shot in the final minute of regulation (right), just a prelude to his game-tying and game-winning (left) 3-pointers.
You remember games like this if you’re old enough, if you go back to the last time the Knicks had to stagger and stumble through a truncated season. That was 1999, and there were moments in that gauntlet of games when it seemed the Knicks were dead, when it seemed the coach would be fired, when the general manager was fired.
“We just had to learn to play together,” Larry Johnson, one of that season’s forever heroes, said yesterday morning.
Johnson was at the Garden accepting a new front-office post with the Knicks, a gig he earned in no small part to the four-point play he dropped on the Pacers in Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals, a moment that still echoes in the ears and the memory banks of anyone who was inside the Garden that day.
Carmelo Anthony doesn’t know that level of noise yet, the inside of a jet engine mixed with the inside of Eric Clapton’s amplifier, the kind of ruckus only the Knicks and the Garden can generate, the loudest sound in New York sports. But he’s getting there. Twice yesterday, he tried to send the Garden into an LJ-level frenzy.
Twice yesterday, he was provided with a preview of precisely what lies ahead of him in a couple of weeks if the Knicks can hold off the Bucks to earn themselves an invitation to the NBA playoff tournament, maybe leap past the Sixers (now tied with them in the No. 7 spot). They might not qualify as contenders yet, not even if they can channel the karma of those late-season Knicks of 1999.
But as they proved — as Melo proved — with this thrilling 100-99 victory over the Bulls: They can still make April a lot of fun for the basketball citizens of Madison Square Garden. And as long as that’s so, they can make life more than a little uncomfortable for whatever contender they would draw in the first round.
“It was a great atmosphere,” Anthony said after pouring in 43 points, after tying the game at the end of regulation with a 3 and winning it with 8.2 seconds left in overtime with another one. “That’s how the Garden is supposed to be. This was a playoff-type game. We might play these guys in the playoffs if we keep going and getting that seed. So this was a big statement game for us — a big win today.”
In some ways, you almost have to go back to 2000, to Reggie Miller’s final dagger in that year’s conference finals, to remember what the Garden is truly capable of. By the time the playoffs arrived at the Garden last year, Amar’e Stoudemire’s back was shot and Chauncey Billups was done and the Knicks had left their heart — and their season — in Boston.
But even at the start yesterday, there was a sense of urgency to the proceedings. The Knicks raced to a 21-point lead after 8 1/2 minutes, and the joint felt on the verge of implosion. The Bulls outscored them by 31 points — 31 points! — across the next 35 1/2 minutes, and the reality of what still lies before them — Sixers in front, Bucks behind — seemed so present, and so ominous.
And then …
Tyson Chandler: “It was incredible. Incredible. The Garden was pumping.”
Iman Shumpert: “It was like when you got stops or made big shots, you felt everybody jump. It was weird to see, just everybody jump at the same time. I’ve never been in a building like that.”
And Melo, after making the second 3, with Luol Deng’s hand tickling his face as he released it: “This is my house.”
It can be. Maybe it will be. He will have every opportunity to make that happen across the next few weeks, to help this merry band of lockout survivors try to duplicate the ’99ers, to make something out of a season that seemed destined for doom on a dozen different occasions.
“We kept making plays,” Mike Woodson said. “We kept grinding.”
More grinding ahead. More plays to make. More chances to make the Garden their own, make it come alive again, make it sound like 1999 again.