WORTH THE WAIT
New York finally gets heavyweight interborough slugfest it always wanted
HERE was a game worthy of the city, worthy of New York, worthy of the boroughs that have delivered so much to the City Game across the decades. This, in its small way, was all the minions afflicted with basketball jones have ever truly craved: Knicks vs. Nets, Manhattan vs. Brooklyn, played at a breathtaking level.
This was all of that. There is something of a pity that such a night, such a game, should be decided by foul shots (although from here it did look like a legit call on Mitch Robinson), but it was part of a wonderful narrative that
James Johnson — who earlier had hit a killer 3 for the Nets — drained both free throws with 2.2 seconds left.
It ended 112-110. It will have legs, this game. We’ve wanted Knicks-Nets to matter for so long, and only occasionally has it provided. This time it provided.
“I thought the atmosphere was great, it felt like a barnburner,” Nets coach Steve Nash said. “It felt like a great college or a great high school game.”
Back and forth the teams went at each other, throwing haymakers, jabbing and slugging, the Nets seizing control with a 14-0 run to start the third quarter that pushed them to a 16-point lead, the Knicks finishing the quarter with a 14-2 push, the two teams going back and forth all across a scintillating fourth quarter.
When the Knicks went on their runs — when Evan Fournier hit a 3 late that tied the game at 110 especially — it sounded like Barclays Center had become a Madison Square Garden Annex. At the end, it was the Nets fans who walked away happier.
“We know it’s going to be a pro-Knicks crowd,” Nash said. “The Knicks have been around for 75 years.”
On the other side of the arena, Tom Thibodeau wasn’t much in the mood to throw adverbs and adjectives at a splendid basketball show. He was too busy looking at the stat sheet, at the 21 fouls called against his Knicks (to 14 for the Nets), to the 25 free throws the Nets took (as opposed to 12 for the Knicks). There were also two missed Kevin Durant dunks that sure looked like he might’ve been bailed out by a whistle.
“Something’s not right,” Thibodeau steamed.
“I’m watching what’s going on both ways, they’re a good team and they played well. But Julius [Randle] was also driving the ball pretty darn hard,” he stewed.
“I’m pissed,” he spat, and walked out of the interview room, and that’ll probably make his wallet a little lighter Wednesday morning. But even that’s part of it, isn’t it? In a backyard basketball brawl, the home gym almost always gets the friendly whistle.
“It’s on the road,” said Randle, who drew a late technical foul, probably a result of taking all of two foul shots all night despite taking it to the basket constantly. “It’s going to happen.”
“It doesn’t matter who’s on that team or who’s on this team,” James Harden said. “The energy is always going to be there. There’s always going to be fans rooting for their respective teams.”
Harden had unwittingly added a little kerosene to the proceedings Tuesday night through no fault of his own. Before the game, eternal Knicks nemesis Reggie Miller — calling the game courtside for TNT — had given Harden what Mil
ler described as a “pep talk” after reading Harden’s comments following a loss to the Suns that he wasn’t quite comfortable.
“What do you mean you don’t know when to score and when to pass?” Miller said. “You never had this problem in Houston. You’re James Harden!”
Harden scored 27 in the first half. He finished with 34 points, 10 rebounds, eight assists. He figured it out fine soon enough.
(Sixteen years after taking his last jump shot, Reggie still knows how to sneak a stone into the Knicks’ shoes, journalism ethics be damned!)
If it was a game that had to leave both fan bases satisfied — beating the Knicks is always a boon for the Nets, and staying stride-for-stride with the Nets on a night of lineup flux was a definite step forward for the Knicks — it left the participants feeling less so.
The Knicks grumbled all the way back to Manhattan about the whistles, and while Randle did his best to bite his tongue and focus on the game he did say: “Y’all saw what happened. Everyone saw what was going on. [The refs] clearly don’t understand the game,” adding that he was told Tuesday night that sometimes his strength is held against him.
The Nets? They played just well enough, something Nash freely admitted: “On one hand I felt it was closer than it needed to be. On the other we found a way and got one.”
New York got one too. Next chapter: Feb. 16, at the Garden. Two-and-a-half months? Can’t we just have another one tomorrow?