The Knicks have plenty of reasons to pack it in today, if that’s what they’re inclined to do.
Yes, a Boston team is up three games to none in a best-of-seven series, and the only two times in the last 35 years a team has come back down 0-3, a Boston team was involved (the Flyers stunned the Bruins last year; I am told this also happened in a baseball series in 2004, though the participants’ names escape me . . .)
Vegas would take off the board the odds that a diminished Knicks team could win four in a row off a Celtics team missing Shaquille O’Neal and little else. So, no: even a win today wouldn’t restore hope of an upset. It likely would just be setting up a local celebration in Boston Tuesday night. It would nudge the inevitable ahead a few days. Why seek a continuance for all of that?
Especially when Amar’e Stoudemire sounded like a man who was more than a little afraid of doing additional damage if he played with his bad back tomorrow (and whose plus/minus Friday was minus-34; normally that’s a bogus stat, but minus-34 has to tell you something.)
Especially with no hope of Chauncey Billups returning, and especially with his back-up, Toney Douglas, a new addition to the team’s unofficial injury list with a banged-up shoulder.
There are dozens of reasons to think the Knicks could no-show. Maybe the most telling is this: they aren’t likely to hear it nearly as loudly from the crowd today if they do, because Knicks fans already have spewed their quote of venom, booing them off the court at the conclusion of Game 3.
But here’s the thing:
Today is still an important statement for the Knicks, no matter how many issues they have strapped to their shoulders, no matter how inviting the first tee time of spring may seem. Because the story of these 2010-11 Knicks still hasn’t been finished. There is still a denouement. Still an ending. Still a final judgment.
And a meek four-game laydown will obscure — if not completely spoil — so much of what came before. And will sour the final memory of a team that, for most of the season, deserved better than that.
“If we got to foul somebody, if we got to knock somebody out,” Carmelo Anthony said yesterday, “we got to do whatever we got to do to avoid a sweep.”
The Knicks could have better used some of that frontier justice Friday night, when the Cel tics not only pushed then around at will — with zero conse quence — but openly laughed at them, too.
Nevertheless, Antho ny’s point is a good one, and it will be an early testament to his capacity to lead if he can get the rest of the team to buy into that theory as well.
In a top-heavy conference, it was obvious from the beginning that whoever finished 6-7-8 was going to have a hard stretch of road against 1-2-3, no matter who finished where. If anything, this maybe shows how useful it would have been for the Knicks to have gotten themselves together earlier and made a real run at the Hawks in the 5 hole.
But that never happened. Though there are still some random holdouts on the wisdom of the trade the Knicks pulled off at the All-Star break, the larger truth is that for better or worse, this is the core the Knicks will have going forward. They are a team of two superstars and an as-yet-undetermined supporting cast. That is a good place to be moving forward, and would be even with a sweep.
It would just be better without the bad taste 0-for-4 would yield, without the residue of a cameo toe-dip in postseason. The Knicks aren’t reaching for history today, or even the start of it. Just a plane ticket to Boston, and a chance to keep the season alive two more days. That ought to be enough.
Whether it is will tell us a lot more about the makeup of this team than any of the 85 games they already have played.