This game shows harsh reality of pro basketball in New York City
The bounce was from a better time, a prosperous time, a time when dark clouds didn’t follow the Knicks around everywhere they wandered. If your basketball memory goes back that far, 18 years, that was what you saw when you saw Kristaps Porzingis get the shooter’s bounce with 32 seconds left.
Front rim. Backboard. Bucket. That right there was an Allan Houston bounce.
It was understandable if your mind and your imagination were somewhere else, of course, if you let your attention wander to the spring of 1999, far from the winter of 2017, to the dying seconds of Game 5 of an insanely intense playoff game against the hated Heat, rather than this … this …
(Trying to be kind …)
This quadrennial matchup of interborough basketball neighbors.
(Sorry. Best I could do.)
Porzingis’ basket doubled the Knicks’ lead from three to six, and it all but guaranteed they would not allow the Nets to equal their January victory total on the first day of February. It also clinched some conversational intrigue, since the Knicks rallied to a 95-90 victory (overcoming a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit) without Carmelo Anthony playing one fourth-quarter second.
“Always tough figuring that out,” coach Jeff Hornacek said when it was over. “If we lose the game, I would’ve heard that I should’ve put the starters back.”
That’s a fine sentiment. It is. And it really is good to see the Knicks are not embracing — publicly, anyway — any notion of tanking. Not that it would have been easy to tell the difference. For most of the game, the Knicks looked quite natural trailing the Nets. When is a tank a tank — and when is a team simply rank?
Well … when the Nets are sharing the floor with you …
“Look,” Nets coach Kenny Atkinson helpfully reminded at game’s end. “We were 1-15 in January.”
The standings reinforce that. And so did the fourth quarter. Yes, the Knicks played well behind The Replacements. Porzingis had 19 points. Willy Hernangomez had 16 points and 16 rebounds in just 25 minutes. And there was a little bit of history:
Sasha Vujacic rose from the crypt, scored 12 points and converted not one but two four-point plays, the second of which cut a 76-70 deficit to 76-74 with nine minutes left.
The Nets, as only really, really bad teams do, were leading by two, yet already out of it.
“We try to make the hard play when the easy play is there,” Atkinson said, wearing the look of a man who, a few hours before Groundhog Day, had spent most of the past four months living the exact same day. “We go for the lookaway when we can make a bounce pass. We kicked to the curb 10 or 15 plays in transition …”
On the other side of the wall at Barclays Center, Hornacek smiled. He knows what Atkinson is going through. He knows what Atkinson is enduring, because most nights he’s the one with the thousand-yard stare, undoubtedly thinking to himself what Casey Stengel sagely said back in the day: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
“We needed that win,” Hernangomez said. “I thought everyone who played did a really good job.”
They did a good enough job, and in a season when so little has gone right, the Knicks took advantage of the 9-40 team looking like a 9-40 team. They certainly didn’t seem to mind that nobody was planning on placing the tape of this game in a time capsule.
Reality will return soon enough. The Cavaliers will be at the Garden on Saturday. They make the hard plays. And all the easy ones, too.