Now comes the sitzkrieg before the blitz

The devil must’ve had an ironically good Easter Sunday. How else to explain the inversion of the natural order witnessed at Madison Square Garden after the Indiana Pacers defeated the New York Knicks: Tom Thibodeau, speaking to the media after his team gave up 141 points with reasonable calm? This from a man who’d stand on the world’s most beautiful white sand beach and rip the ocean for lollygagging, what with all the ebb and the flow? Where was Raging Thibs? The barking? The bottomless, seething disdain for every point permitted?   

Hopefully tucked on a shelf somewhere, waiting, along with Julius Randle and Jalen Brunson, for Saturday at 6:00 p.m., when the Knicks begin their playoffs in one of the world’s truly magical sporting venues. Mention the Colosseum or the Bernabéu in any country on Earth and people’s eyes light up. Same with Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse. But before that happens, there were unpaid workers wages in need of misdirecting to James Dolan, so the Knicks and Pacers put on an entertaining game 82. Did we learn anything?

We learned the Knicks get along better than a lot of others teams seem to.

Oops! Wrong clip.

We learned Obi Toppin is going to be a terrific starter for one of the other 29 teams someday soon. That isn’t ripping the Knicks. In 2020 nobody had Julius Randle about to embark on two All-NBA seasons over three years. The Knicks drafted Toppin to replace Randle; he was older than most of his lottery peers and considered someone whose game would translate pretty quickly to the pros. Toppin started the Knicks’ last five games and averaged 22 points on 58% shooting from the field and 44% from deep. A year ago he also started the final pentet. His numbers then? 27 a game on 55/46 shooting. Unless the NBA expands to 6-on-6, it’s hard to see it happening for Toppin in New York. Easy to see him blowing up elsewhere.

We didn’t learn the Knicks were right not to trade the farm for Donovan Mitchell, but being reminded never gets old. Immanuel Quickley is 23. Quentin Grimes is 22. The next World Cup is in 2026. IQ and QG won’t even be in their primes yet. THEY STILL WON’T EVEN BE IN THEIR PRIMES.

We learned what it feels like to head into the postseason feeling pretty awesome about your centers. Earlier today someone posted a stat about centers I thought said “centaurs.” Mitchell Robinson and Isaiah Hartenstein couldn’t be more of a threat if they had four legs and sprung straight out of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Robinstein’s combined output? 17 points, 22 rebounds, seven assists, seven blocks and one rejection of the premise that their playoff foes’ bigs are all that.

We learned a lot about the Knicks this season, almost all of it good. We’ll be tempted to forget once they lose their first playoff game, one reason I’m grateful in 2023 for the 2021 Knicks. Two years ago, they hadn’t made the playoffs in eight years; the adrenaline of their return was so intense it was like being a kid again, the highs and lows lasting as long as they did. The loss to Atlanta was such a crash I think for many it tarnished what had been a remarkable campaign. Take this week to enjoy your life and bask in the Knicks being respected and even a little feared. In the playoffs there’s winning and there’s misery. In the 2022-23 Knicks’ regular season there was winning and joy.