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I’m not always so good at taking notes on basketball games that I plan to write about, especially if my haunted team, the New York Knicks, is among the contestants. It feels like bad luck. But on Wednesday night, feeling fine, watching the fourth quarter of a game we seemed destined to win, I typed this jubilant nonsentence into a sparsely occupied Google Doc:
That sequence with KAT block, Siakam goes down, Knicks end up with the ball back, OG layup! That’s the shit I’m talking about (7 min left)
If you’re reading this, you already know. That play—nice D leading to a bright, punctuating, happy-making score at the other end, leading to a sixteen-point (and eventually seventeen-point) Knicks lead—was not, in fact, “the shit” I was “talking about,” because the Knicks somehow coughed up that big lead and lost to their opponent, the Indiana Pacers, 135–138.
I now regret the exclamation point. And my whimsical tone. And, most of all—and, my God, I beat my breast, shout “Mea maxima culpa,” and tearfully repent for—my impulse to historicize an event that hadn’t completed its unfolding. I wish I could spend my first beach day of the year Frisbeeing my godforsaken laptop, which brings me nothing but woe and trouble, off the edge of the Jersey shore and into the ocean. This is what it’s like to root for the Knicks.
This was the first game of the Knicks’ Eastern Conference Final series against the Pacers. It’s been a quarter century since the Knicks have reached this stage of the playoffs—if they win this series, they’ll go to the N.B.A. Finals, just four wins away from the big trophy—and the whole city seems anxious, unpredictable, worked up, warily fun. You see a guy on the sidewalk with a Knicks cap on and, freed somewhat from the usually reticent manners of metropolitan life, you shout “Go Knicks!” and he shouts “Go Knicks!” right back. A good team brings out the sappy, hopeful strain in New York.
Both teams had shot well in the first half. The Knicks’ hale diet on offense was a flurry of pivots and step-backs by the heroic point guard Jalen Brunson; contested but deadly accurate three-pointers by Karl-Anthony Towns—the KAT in question—who arrived in New York just this season, after a trade from the Minnesota Timberwolves; and swift, angular, barely controlled drives to the hoop, powered with a skittish, amphetamine energy, by the tireless rebounder Josh Hart. The Pacers—athletic, young, clever, cocky guys with vibes like the youngest brother in a rich exurban family—answered with pesky defense and an approach to basketball that more nearly approximated a sprint-heavy peewee track meet. All these guys do is run. Both teams had scored almost seventy points by halftime, rushing through the game with a birdlike heartbeat that I didn’t totally enjoy.
The Knicks usually play a bit more methodically than this, but, by defending ably, rebounding well, and shooting even better, they built a big lead after the break. When I wrote that idiotic note, with seven minutes to go, they were up by sixteen. When O. G. Anunoby banked home that layup, after an impressive defensive play by Towns—who’s generally not the most dependable on that end of the floor—I karate-chopped the air, making it whistle, and pantomimed a scream, trying not to wake up my sleeping baby. I allowed myself, for the first time all night, to imagine that we’d win the game, maybe the series, hell, maybe the whole thing.
But I should’ve known better! It hasn’t been exactly enjoyable, after all, following the progress of these tough, often inspired, sometimes infuriating, always confoundingly flawed Knicks. In the first round of the playoffs, they were pushed to the brink of collapse by the up-and-coming Detroit Pistons, led by the big, fluid, democratic passer Cade Cunningham. The Pistons didn’t have as much high-end talent as the Knicks, but each of their players understood his role better than the Knicks’ ensemble players typically do—a dynamic that might now be threatening to repeat itself against the Pacers.
In the second round of the playoffs, against the defending champion, the Boston Celtics, the script was flipped: the Knicks got down by huge margins in the first two games but came storming back for the victory in both, creating a 2–0 edge. This became even more imposing when, toward the end of Game Four—another one that the Knicks seemed poised to win—the Celtics star Jayson Tatum suffered an excruciating injury to his Achilles tendon and crumpled onto the hardwood, howling in pain.
Nothing happens as it should with these Knicks, captained as they are by the coach Tom Thibodeau, whose sole notion of “identity,” when it comes to a basketball team, is hard-nosed effort. Thibodeau plays his best players too much, stubbornly hoping, it seems, that their talent will stand in for the precision it takes to bring a game calmly to its rightful conclusion. You only ever get a fuzzy sense of situational tactics with him at the helm. I love his irascibility—like many New Yorkers I know, he has never once looked satisfied—but his decision-making drives me crazy.
In any case, in Wednesday’s game, the Pacers’ small forward Aaron Nesmith, who’d been busy all night guarding Brunson—who, in any case, ended up with forty-three grinding, dizzying points, each the fruit of Brunson’s broad, cosmopolitan vocabulary of offensive moves—suddenly got hot from the three-point range. Nesmith kept pulling from deep and hitting, slowly, and then not so slowly, chipping away at the Knicks’ lead. With less than a minute left, the Knicks were still up by nine: not as comfortable a cushion as they’d had before, but still more than enough to close things out.
The Knicks chose this moment—maybe they were winded by the hot and heavy game-long pace—to lose their organization on defense, forgetting to guard the three-point line that represented the Pacers’ only chance to catch up. The Pacers, coached by Rick Carlisle, a sour-faced guy known for strategic brilliance, choreographed a perfect late-game dance of intentional fouls, slowing down the game. It didn’t help that the Knicks, now a bit tight under pressure, missed two foul shots in the final minute. Suddenly, the Knicks were only up by two.
Tyrese Haliburton, Indiana’s star point guard, likes to play the villain. He’s a lanky character: no waist, all arms and legs. He’s devilishly quick, sees passing lanes where other players see blurring bodies in chaos, makes intelligent little feints with his shoulders and hips which seem incidental until you realize that his defender is off rhythm and he’s put the ball into the bottom of the hoop. He’s good, O.K.? The logic of sports, though, means that for the next week or two he is my mortal enemy.
Haliburton pushed the ball upcourt, reaching the foul line—where was our defense?—before stopping on a dime, running back to the three-point line, and hoisting up a shot that bounced high off the rim and then dropped gracefully through the hoop. His foot, it turns out, was just barely on the line before he jumped: the shot was a two-pointer, not a three. But the impact was just as devastating. The Knicks had choked, a fact that Haliburton emphasized by wrapping both of his hands around his neck. (This was a reference to an identical gesture once made by a Pacer of yore, Reggie Miller, who, leading a similarly devastating playoff comeback against the Knicks, scored eight points in nine seconds. Ha ha ha.)
I’d rather not talk about overtime. The Knicks are down when they should be up. There’s another game on Friday. I’ll keep the color out of my notes. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
