KNICKS, MSG SPRING LEAKS
... but both get fixed in time for victory over Raptors
KNICKS 102 RAPTORS 96
With four minutes left in the third quarter, a leak in Madison Square Garden’s roof prompted a 14-minute stoppage. It was the very rare NBA rain delay, but the water gathering on the court didn’t do much damage.
The issue for the Knicks was that they lost momentum. And fortunately for them, RJ Barrett again plugged the hole.
The 20-year-old budding closer again hit the biggest shot for the Knicks on Sunday night, burying a 3-pointer with 34 seconds remaining to highlight a wild and unconventional 102-96 victory over the Raptors.
The Knicks had dominated the Raptors for the opening 2 ½ quarters. But upon resolution of the leak, the home team went cold and the Raptors pounced, quickly erasing a 10-point deficit and taking their first lead of the game with 10 minutes left in the fourth quarter.
That set up a crazy finish, with the officials retroactively taking away a Toronto 3-pointer because the shooter stepped out of bounds, and Pascal Siakam later getting whistled for a double-dribble on a drive that would’ve tied the score in the final seconds.
In the end, the Knicks won with Julius Randle scoring 26 points and Barrett (19 points) coming up clutch for the second straight game. Tom Thibodeau was able to laugh at the leak.
“I thought it was baseball,” the coach said. “We had a rain delay.”
Every game is important for the Knicks’ playoff hopes or seeding but the Raptors represent, at this point, a unique category of significance. The worst-case scenario for the Knicks, although improbable, is falling to 11th and outside of the play-in tournament. The Raptors occupy 11th in the East and are theoretically dangerous with recent champions Siakam, Kyle Lowry and Fred VanVleet on the roster (VanVleet did not play Sunday)
With Sunday’s victory, the Knicks (2727), seeded seventh, are now six games ahead of Toronto (21-33).
“I think our guys are building good habits,” Thibodeau said. “You need everyone. You don’t know where it’s going to come from. So that’s the challenge of being ready. So that when the ball goes up you can’t have excuses. You just have to get it done.”
The Raptors were playing on the second night of a back-to-back and the Knicks took advantage, taking an 11-point lead after the first quarter. Toronto had no answer for Thibodeau’s swarming defense and managed just 42 points in the first half while shooting 31%. The regression of Siakam (5-for-18 shooting overall Sunday), an All-NBA player last season, is bad news for Canada’s team.
But they still found form after the roof leak and adopted a zone defense. The Knicks went cold and needed, among other developments, another heroic Barrett 3-pointer to recover. A key was the negated three-pointer from Toronto’s Malachi Flynn with seven minutes remaining. It put the Raptors up by seven — their biggest lead of the game — but was reviewed by the league elsewhere and determined that a small part of Flynn’s heel touched out of bounds.
A seven-point deficit unexpectedly fell to four and the Knicks immediately seized momentum.
The Raptors have been a mess all season, which is less surprising considering they’ve been forced to temporarily relocate to Tampa Bay because of COVID travel restrictions. Siakam, the team’s star, was fined $50,000 for heated words directed at his coach. Siakam was also suspended a game for leaving the bench too early. Team president Masai Ujirii flirted with tanking the season to land a high draft pick, and then traded Norm Powell at the trade deadline. Regardless of the circumstances, the Raptors remain in the playoff mix, albeit on the outside looking in.
“I shake my head all the time when I look down and find out we’re only two games out (of the last spot of the play-in tournament),” Raptors coach Nick Nurse said. “So that’s encouraging.”