NBA

Knicks veterans Martin, Kidd proving they’re Net too old for this

It was Richard Jefferson who said for the record what everyone had been thinking for the better part of three years. This was April 25, 2004, and the New Jersey Nets had just closed out the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, the guys from the suburbs dismissing the city five, barely even needing a broom to sweep them aside.

“These folks?” Jefferson had said, nudging his head in the general vicinity of where the Knicks fans had quietly absorbed their fate across the past few hours. “I know they know what they’re missing. I know how much they’d kill to have our team playing here 41 games a year.”

Jefferson smiled.

“I mean, can you even imagine how crazy this place would be if they got to see Jason Kidd and Kenyon Martin do what they do night after night after night?”

In those years, it was like a cruel joke to Knicks fans, still sitting at the beginning of a decade-long fall into the NBA morass. Across the river, some nights, most nights, the Nets would be lucky to draw 13,000 people to watch Kidd and Kenyon and the others put on the league’s most dynamic show.

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That night at the Garden, as the Knicks fans tried to talk themselves into their backcourt of Stephon Marbury and Penny Hardaway, as they watched Shandon Anderson and Frank Williams and Michael Sweetney, they saw the Nets inevitably pull away in the fourth quarter, saw Kidd pile up 20 points, eight rebounds and seven assists, watched Martin go off for 36 points and 13 rebounds.

And you could hear what amounted to a sigh of resignation fill the old gym, 19,763 people essentially mumbling as one: “If only.”

Nine years later, “if only” has become “what if.”

As in: What if Kidd had chosen to join the Nets this year instead of the Knicks, or if he’d opted to take a reduced role in Dallas — or anywhere else?

As in: What if the Knicks had continued to join ranks with the rest of the league and viewed Martin’s warranty as expired and his career as in repose?

Nine years later, nine years older, Kidd and Martin finally give New York City a glimpse of what they were missing back in the day. Kidd is 40, Martin is 35, and they aren’t supposed to be what they are for a team harboring hopes of a long playoff spring. They aren’t supposed to be key components, critical elements, not this late in the game, not with so many more yesterdays than tomorrows in their legs, their lungs, their legacies.

“Both of them are still so relentless, and savvy,” Knicks coach Mike Woodson said yesterday, a day after the pairing of old Nets-turned-Knets had teamed up to push the Knicks out to a fourth-quarter rescue of Game 1 of their best-of-seven with the Celtics. “When you’ve got Jason Kidd, as long as he’s been in the league, and Kenyon … it makes a difference. They bought us some stability, especially on the defensive end.”

Woodson saw his share of the K&K boys when they were in their prime, first as an assistant to Larry Brown in Philadelphia, later in Detroit. The Nets succeeded the Sixers as Eastern Conference champs, then handed the trophy off to the Pistons, and Woodson had an up-close look at all of it.

“They were pretty damned good,” Woodson said.

Woodson still remembers an epic Game 5 of the 2004 Eastern semis, the Nets and Pistons going three overtimes at the Palace, the Nets imposing their will (for the last time, as it turned out) in stealing the game, pushing the eventual champs to the brink. And for anyone else who saw what the Nets did in those years, what happened Saturday was hardly surprising.

Kidd and Kenyon used to save their very best for the Celtics in those days, you may recall, winning seven straight playoff games against them in 2002 and 2003. The Celtics humiliated them in Game 3 of the 2002 East Final, erasing a 21-point fourth-quarter lead. Afterward, Kidd and Kenyon grimly and separately vowed that loss wouldn’t break them. It didn’t.

And now they’ve beaten them eight playoff games in a row. Talk all you want about history in this series. There are two Knicks for whom history isn’t a burden, but a bounty.