The end is what will gnaw at these Knicks for a few days before they face the Wizards in Washington on Friday. The end was a beautiful ride from RJ Barrett that went wrong, with smart guy Jimmy Butler staying with Barrett just long enough to force Barrett to go higher on the glass than he wanted to.
The ball turned away. The last buzzer groaned in AmericanA Airlines Arena. There would be no overtime. There will be no refund for Sunday’s highly contested match between these two teams. There would be no satisfactory flight home from Miami. The final score was 98-96, Heat, the final verdict that the Knicks, even though they are better, still learn how to win, and share if this curve involves learning how not to lose.
“We need everyone to play well,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “And in the end, we just fell short.”
But if you invested yourself in this Knicks team, you saw something that should have made you feel awfully good. By this time, you have surely learned to trust Thibodeau, to rely on his instincts, to realize that he knows the small nuances that make willing teams improve.
It should therefore have been obvious that Thibodeau was not interested in a good sense of reunion when it became clear that Derrick Rose was not only available but also interested in a second tour with the Knicks and a third tour under Thibodeau’s supervision. Thibodeau made it clear that he was only talking about one thing and one thing.
And there is one certain way to make that ambition come true.
“I’ve always been partial,” he said earlier in the day, “to good players.”
And Rose, even at 32, even after the twists and turns of a sometimes stellar career, is still a good player. As if to intensify it – and also to subdue the anxiety that Knicks fans had that he was going to steal Immanuel Quickley’s playing time – the two of them had Tuesday night, number 4 and no. takes the word by 3:27 in the first quarter and the Knicks seven down.
And over the next six minutes, spanning two quarters, the Knicks went 25-6. Quickley was good. But it was Rose who raised eyebrows: with the old flair coming out of the basket, shooting it well, stealing it and encouraging his teammates. It was impossible to keep your eyes off him.
He would finish with 14 points and three assistants and play only 20 minutes. As the Knicks tried to steal from the Heat late in the fourth one on the bench, Thibodeau did not want to ask for too much of his first day on the field. But you could feel the impact immediately.
Quickley talked this morning about Rose going looking for him and Obi Toppin during dinner Monday night, and giving them his number. Quickley laughed at their shared legacy as survivors of John Calipari’s hard-core college apprenticeship, and laughed that Thibodeau was in the NBA for both of their coaches.
“So much can be learned from him,” Quickley said.
“He always tries to win,” Barrett said. “It’s great to have such a guy on our team.”
As for Rose herself? He seems to be moving straight to get a new chance in New York, and to rebuild his partnership with Thibodeau, a combination that a decade ago could have really produced something special in Chicago if bad luck had not intervened. .
“We have a synergy, I can not explain it,” Rose said. “We are a strange couple, but for some reason we understand the game in the same way. We are students of the game, we look at the game and try to understand it better.”
He not only understands that part of his role at the Knicks will help adapt kids to NBA life, but endorses it.
‘My job,’ he said, ‘is to come in and understand that I want to be a mentor to the young children and help them develop. And also show that I can still hop a little, ‘
He shows a bit of all of Tuesday, a game the Knicks lost because they’re still learning how not to lose such games. Those lessons might just be easier to understand going forward. There’s a new mentor in the house. And he can still hop a little.