Some games, sitting out is the smart play
OAKLAND, Calif. — The Knicks certainly weren’t going to walk into Oracle Arena and win this game absent Derrick Rose and Carmelo Anthony. They probably wouldn’t have won with Rose and Anthony (or with Clyde and Pearl, too, for that matter), not with the Warriors devoting so much of the night to an impromptu homage to those-hit-the-open-man Knicks.
The Warriors named the final score: 103-90. They didn’t humiliate the Knicks, they merely humbled them. Now the Knicks get one more game out west, in Denver, before returning home to New York, hopeful they get their two stars back, hopeful that granting them a night of rest can get them whole again, get them healthy again.
“I don’t want to say it’s good to take some time off, but it was due to my shoulder,” Anthony explained before the game, after insisting at the morning’s shootaround he intended to play. “It was hindering me a little bit, but I thought I was able to go.”
The Knicks can ill afford to have their big guns miss winnable games, which is why it may be cynical but also deadly truthful to say it was wise to sacrifice Anthony (and Rose, for that matter) in a game the Knicks probably had 1 percent chance of winning. It’s far more important to win games like the one upcoming at Denver, like any of the others scattered across their schedule.
It is a sensitive subject, of course. Ever since this became an open tactic in the past few years — Spurs coach Gregg Popovich was the one who really brought it into the mainstream, regularly sitting Tim Duncan and other veterans in recent years and not giving a hoot what the NBA, its TV partners or anyone else has to say about it — it has become routine to winkwink about how this has always been a part of the game’s fabric.
The Spurs, of course, can always afford to take a few games off because they win about twothirds of the other games they play. Same deal with the Cavaliers, who are going to walk to the No. 1 seed in the East.
It’s what made the look on Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek’s face at shootaround Thursday morning especially delicious. This was before Anthony was ruled out, and he was asked about the way sitting top players has evolved: Haven’t there always been a few games here and there for which stars showed up in street clothes, nursing whatever fancy-sounding injury of the moment might be “ailing” them?
Wasn’t Popovich — aren’t the Cavaliers — merely ending the folly of pretending?
“When you were with the Jazz, and you had high-profile veterans and you guys needed a rest, how would …”
Hornacek ended the question with a smile.
“We never took off,” Hornacek said. “Not even …” “We never took off.”
And now the smile vanished, and the years melted away, and Hornacek — as nicely as possible — talked about a different time in the NBA, and different cast of characters, and a different set of standards.
“Karl Malone and John Stockton never missed practice, let alone a game. Until his last year with the Lakers when he had knee surgery, Karl missed like seven games in his career and they were all suspensions. John had surgery one time and missed a few weeks. That was it.”
“A different time,” someone said.
“You could say that,” Hornacek said, and the laugh returned.
And there was the evidence that it was only fans aggrieved at the Cavaliers’ callous disregard for fans who had a problem with what Cleveland did. It wasn’t just the lunch-hour YMCA gym rats who play every day, on backto-back-to-back-to-back-to-back days for nothing more than the thrill of executing a proper boxout, whose sensibilities were offended. Think about this for a second: Kyrie Irving is 24 years old. Kevin Love is 28. LeBron James is 31, with lots of tread on the tires, but he’s also a physical freak the likes of which the league has rarely seen before.
In 1996-97 — the first year the Jazz qualified for the NBA Finals, in which they lost to the Bulls — Utah won 64 games. Malone, Stockton and Hornacek were 33, 34 and 33 years old. They played 82, 82 and 82 games in the regular season.
A different time, indeed.