Pacers 130, Knicks 109: There was nothing left to give
In which the end of the road is the start of the journey
I bought an organizer the other day. $10 on clearance. Just something to hold pens, markers, post-its. Desk minutiae. Today when I picked it up the bottom broke clean off.
The defending champs blew a 20-point second-half lead in Game 7 at home last night. They’re out. The team they beat in the Finals didn’t get out of the first round. The team that won the prior title couldn’t get past the Play-In. Signs of the times. Jobs became gigs. Time became trends. Climate hell nears. Everything’s breaking down. And yet, even now, context matters.
It’s not that jobs became gigs so much as career tracks gave way to daisy chains while wage theft worsened. Having the time and the access to the world at our fingertips cost us intimacy – with each other and ourselves. The criminals rushing our extinction are the ones most likely not only to survive but to do so in comfort. What’s the point of endurance? In such a place?
The New York Knicks, their season over after a 130-109 Game 7 loss to Indiana, seem an unlikely rebuttal, particularly after losing two more players to injury; ironic, given how few Knicks are left to lose. OG Anunoby nailed the Willis Reed look, hitting a three and shot-clock-beating long two on his first two tries, but after five minutes Tom Thibodeau pulled him for the last time this season; Anunoby really wasn’t moving well at all. Late in the third, Jalen Brunson’s hand struck Tyrese Haliburton’s knee. He went to the locker room, returned for 14 seconds, then left for good with what turned out to be a fractured hand.
The longer this series went, the more the odds tilted toward the fresher legs. Seven times in seven games a Pacer played 36+ minutes; it happened 20 times with the Knicks – and that wasn’t always out of necessity. In the Pacers’ Game 4 rout, neither team had a player reach 36 minutes. In the Knicks’ Game 5 blowout, three players played 39+, including 43 by Brunson. The last seven quarters of the series the Pacers were the better team. The record-setting 67% they shot wasn’t due to them making some ungodly number of contested threes, but rather running action after action, pushing the pace, defending 94 feet for 48 minutes. Ai, if the Knicks had held on and won Game 3 . . .
“There was nothing left to give at the end,” Tom Thibodeau said, though up until the very end the Knicks were James Bond and the basketball gods Q, introducing one bizarre but brilliant counter after another. OG’s out? Donte DiVincenzo goes off for 39, including nine threes. Brunson lost? This Alec Burks here turns into a reasonable approximation, good in a pinch for 26 and a Brunsonian 8-of-8 at the line. Still, even the biggest heart someday succumbs to the maths of stress of time. The Knicks were an injury away from having to break the fourth wall.
What do you want from the team you root for? I’m talking intangibles. Everyone wants a title, natch. Here more than anywhere. What else? You want a contender? Who wouldn’t? Today was New York’s 24th playoff game the past two seasons. Them, Denver and Boston are the only teams to win a playoff series last year and this. Winning the championship is always the holy grail, but few heathen joys intoxicate quite like copium and the what-if strain hits purer than most. Philadelphia hasn’t come down for weeks – interestingly, Indiana was high as hell on it after losing the first two games, with Rick Carlisle’s threatening to post a 78 Theses detailing some league-wide conspiracy to rig games in New York for the home team – a conspiracy that doesn’t seem to have been in effect the last quarter-century, and one Carlisle oddly stopped talking about once Anunoby injured his hamstring.
The Knicks are good. They’ve been good. They have everything in place to not only stay good, but be even better. They lost, but never beat themselves. They made the calendar the opponent and conditioned themselves to beat it. That’s a lot of ocean to row. If they hadn’t lost half the oarsmen . . .
What do you want from the team you root for? In a world where everything breaks down? What’s fair to ask? For the fans who are the lifeblood of a brand that without them is mere mannequin? From players who could only give you more of their body and their blood if they were starting a new religion and expecting to be denied three times before the cock crows? I’m talking the real stuff, the stuff that got you from wherever you started to here, that kept you alive during the blanking, sunless years.
What if there were a team that literally never stopped? Usually that language is figurative; the Knicks took it literally, made it their faith and walked the path. Brunson, DiVincenzo, Josh Hart: they’re always pushing, probing, pressing. Deuce McBride went from out of the rotation to a nice couple of weeks to a nice couple of months to a very nice season. In the summer of 2022, Isaiah Hartenstein signed a two-year deal for $16M with the Knicks. This summer you could double the years and the annual value and that might not be enough for him. Consider Randle’s growth over five years in New York. Speaking of summer 2022, remember what a lot of fans were saying about Tom Thibodeau then versus now. Go down the line: DiVincenzo, Mitchell Robinson, Precious Achiuwa – everybody just seems to get better here.
None more than Brunson, the man with more start-stop than rush hour. His hand injury robbed him and us of the ovation he’d have received whenever his day’s work came to an end. Long may he rest and recuperate. It’ll be interesting to see how the league adjusts after seeing his postseason play and what he has in store for them.
You know what they don’t celebrate when they’re hard-selling the ‘90s Knicks nostalgia? You know how even with all our documents and photographs, you can’t capture what the past smelled like? The ‘90s Knicks became beloved in the early 2000s, when the team started losing; as the losing continued over the years, the ‘90s got re-imagined as some better time. Man, it was hard as hell. You know why? Because almost every year they lost, an opportunity was squandered.
In ‘93, they led the Bulls 2-0, then lost four straight. In ‘94, they had two chances to win the title and didn’t. In ‘97 the league did the squandering, suspending half the team for not sitting unmoved like sociopaths while Charlie Ward was assaulted. In ‘98 it was a broken wrist. In ‘99 it was a broken frontcourt. It was always something. Except 1992. That was the year they announced themselves to the league; even after they lost in Game 7 of the second round, the mood around the fans and the team was on the upswing.
That first year is the honeymoon; everything’s new and exciting, there’s no pressure. After that, it’s marriage: everything somehow narrows and deepens at the same time, meaning fewer relevant outcomes (title/no title) and more intense reactions to them (“This team affirms my soul LET’S GOOOO!”/”Ours is a shame so pronounced it’s visible from space”). But there are honeymoons – the kind you ask your guests to help you fund – and there are honeymoons – the kind gifted to you from your Uncle Leon, the kind where you stay somewhere and never see anyone who isn’t serving you food or massaging your – well, ladies’ choice.
There are seasons and there are seasons. This was that. The ending rubs wrong because it betrayed all that preceded it, like a figure skater skating a perfect 10 but falling on their final jump, only in this case your confident they would’ve landed it if they weren’t missing both legs and an arm. These Knicks weren’t just another team. Not because of what we think they could have been, would have, should have. Because of who they showed they are. They’re who we thought they were, who we swore to everyone they were. That’s the opposite of gaslighting. That’s trust-building.
I bought an organizer the other day. $10 on clearance. Just something to hold pens, markers, post-its. Desk minutiae. Today when I picked it up the bottom broke clean off. Should’ve figured, I thought. I was wrong. Not everything has to break down. Sometimes things break apart from the past, becoming something else entirely, something new. The future is now, because – at long last – the present finally is, too.
