Listen, if you want, you can focus on who wasn’t playing at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. Anthony Davis did not play in the field. He hurt his calf in February, he won’t be joining the Lakers again for a couple more weeks. The Lakers missed him, you bet.
LeBron James did not play in the field. He injured his ankle in March. He has lost 12 games. They also miss him. The Lakers are 5-7 in these games, missing two of the top five players on planet Earth. They are diminished. They are injured. They don’t look like the team that won the NBA title last fall nor will they defend it this summer.
If you want, sure. Focus on that.
But there was another team in the garden on Monday night and for now it’s once again a winning team and once again worthy of the attention of basketball-loving city venues.
The Knicks beat the Lakers 111-96, and went 28-27, and went one step further to consolidate within the 10-team lineup to play a little more basketball starting next month. They continue to play with the cliff, continue to drive right over the edge and continue to threaten to fall over.
And somehow they will never do it.
“This team has a belief,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said Monday, perhaps half an hour after his team sent most people home happy and the Lakers ’share (probably 25%) home to reflect on what your team will be like when the university has returned intact. “We can do it.”
Six days ago, the Knicks looked like they were finally leaking too much oil after spending so much energy trying to stay relevant, stay competitive, and stay within the .500 spit range. They lost their backs to Brooklyn and Boston by a total of four points, and then overtook Memphis by 13 with 6 and a half minutes to go.
If they were behind again, they would be spraying their records, breaking irons and coming out of the sand, and one of their playmates would have to mention by law that “the wheels are falling.”
Unless the wheels did not fall.
Not Friday, when they chained the top 11 and a half minutes of the season during the stretch and in overtime against the Grizzlies. Not Sunday, when they tried to give a game to the Raptors before stealing it in the end. And not on Monday, when they stared at the Lakers ’still-imposing gold suits, regardless of who wore them, and left them out of the garden, two days after the Lakers had eliminated the Barclays Center Nets.
“Go step by step,” Thibodeau said. “Some of these games in which we fell short in the end we played very well. We see a different level of intensity as we go down the stretch and hopefully we can learn as we go. You fall down, you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and leave. “
Julius Randle had a double-double (34 points, 10 rebounds), but on a night when the odds finally reached RJ Barrett (seven points, just 2 of 11 from the field), there was Elfrid Payton going play your best game in weeks, 20 points and a plus of 27 in 27 minutes. There was Nerlens Noel, who dictated the defensive narrative. There was a visit from vintage Derrick Rose, 14 points in 20 electric minutes.
Above all, there was a squeak that has become such an essential part of the team’s DNA. There had probably never been such a lively Knicks bench or a list insisting that love spread.
Even Randle, regularly serenades with chants of “MVP!” now that there are people who can testify to his magnificent season, he admitted that the mantras are “great”, but also that “winning is what motivates us”.
Payton said, “We’re all bought. We’re all locked up. We all want the next man to go well. Everyone plays each other, no personal agendas. A goal.”
There will come a time when the pleasant element of the season will not be enough, when reality will interfere with the pleasure that has been to see this team go up and down and back up for four months. Perhaps this has yet to come on the balance of the regular season, which remains treacherous. Maybe that’s beyond.
Listen, if you want, you can wait for the other shoe to fall or for the sky to fall. Or you can just enjoy the trip. And be honest: it’s never bad to see the Lakers come off the ground at the wrong end of the dash. It doesn’t matter who’s in the uniform.