It did not take much imagination to evoke how those last two minutes of the third term would feel, sound, look, look. If you remember what Madison Square Garden becomes when the Knicks not only play well, but the fans there believe they have an interest in playing well …
Yes. You know. You remember. Intellectually, you knew the Garden was empty Wednesday night, but when the Knicks turned 73-68 down to 78-75, when they finished off a 10-2 run that felt like it was being pulled from the 90s archive, you could almost hear the pleas raining down from the cheap seats, all the way to court.
“DEEEEE- FENSE! DEEEEE- FENSE! ”
While Kevin Knox blocks a shot while Austin Rivers steals, when RJ Barrett strikes one home to surrender it all in 8.1 seconds, you can call the swarming, whirling, echoing call to try to chase the Jazz. the court, to the bus. These moments in the garden, the best moments, swear you can see the momentum swing for the home team.
“It’s so unfortunate that our fans can’t participate in this,” Julius Randle would later say, after the Knicks drilled 112-100 for Utah. late in the second term.
Randle would have given the customers something to get good and hoarse about, and to give in to what his routine night status becomes: 30 points, 16 rebounds, seven assistants, a plus-25 rating. Later, of course, it would be Rivers, who became a phenomenon in the fourth quarter, scoring 14 straight points to turn a 96-96 tie into a 110-100 lead, dropping four straight tries .
By this time, the garden would have felt as if it were collapsing on its foundation. You get it a few times a year when you get a team like this, a team that grabs the believers’ attention like this one has in these first eight games. To see how the Knicks bench goes crazy – Immanuel Quickley and Barrett look happy and cheering in their warm-ups – hints at what it would be like.
“I know the garden will shake,” Randle said. “That’s what we’re all signed up for.”
What Knicks fans have signed up for – what they longed for – is a team that looks so much like this. Every night something different arrives to enjoy. The past two games the Knicks have fallen into big holes – 15 in Atlanta on Monday 18 against the Jazz – and both times they not only figured out how to make a blowout in a nail-biter, but they also figured out how to both to win games.
“The NBA is a long game,” coach Tom Thibodeau said. “You can make land quickly. No lead is safe and no shortage is impossible to overcome. ”
Rivers said: ‘Guys had a sense of urgency. They started talking to each other and said, “Let’s hunt them down point by point.” We knew we did not need a home run, let’s just play basketball, and then everyone had fun, competed, one thing led to another and then it was a ball game again. ‘
It was a ball game again, and then it was a fourth quarter that kept sticking and moving, and the Jazz tried to keep their legs on the second half of a rugby game (after being smoked in Brooklyn on Tuesday night), the Knicks in the hopes that their own legs would survive the eight-man revolution causing injuries in the early season.
And that’s the incredible thing about this team: you could almost understand it if the players relied on enthusiastic and pleading crowds early in a season to get them through. But just as you would imagine it all as a fan, the truth of the players is the following: it’s like playing in an open gym in high school, no one watching except each other and a few scattered people passing by the gym cuts the cafeteria to the biolaboratory.
You know what you are missing.
But they also know what they are missing.
“I’m still trying to imagine it,” said Rivers, who finished with 23 points in 32 minutes. ‘I can imagine what it was like when I played against them. The fans here have so much energy that I can not wait. It will happen. Hopefully we get people here. This is the best place to play basketball and everyone knows it. ”
He shook his head.
‘Those lights going down, the dark standing …
“There is nothing like that.”
Yes. You know. You remember.