POR’ DE FORCE
KP drops career- high 35 as Knicks hold off pesky Pistons
Kristaps Porzingis soars to the basket for two of his career-best 35 points in the Knicks’ 105-102 win over the Pistons, which included the Garden crowd chanting “MVP” for the second-year pro. Porzingis, who was benched late the last time the Knicks faced Detroit, was fired up early, scoring 25 in the first half.
CARMELO Anthony could see it in the dressing room before the game ever started, could sense he was going to see something a little different from Joakim Noah. That’s always been what his teammates have said about Noah, going all the way back to Gainesville, Fla. You don’t just see intensity from him. You feel it. It’s real. It’s tangible. “Noah, from the jump, you could feel it,” Anthony said, maybe an hour after the Knicks held off the Pistons at Madison Square Garden, 105-102. “In the locker room you could feel it. His focus level got us going defensively. He helped out everyone. He was battling everyone.”
These hadn’t been an easy 10 games for Noah, whose conditioning suffered thanks to a balky hamstring in training camp, who has seemed a step slow on some nights, a step off on others. But in game No. 11 he was everything Phil Jackson envisioned he could be when he signed him to that four-year, $72 million contract last July. The numbers were terrific: 15 rebounds and three blocks to go along with seven points in 25 minutes. But as Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek has said all season, Noah’s is a game you appreciate from a vantage point beyond the stat sheet.
He was a plus-11 for those 25 minutes and kept the Pistons’ best player, Andre Drummond, occupied just about the whole time he was out there. Drummond did score 21 points but he earned every one. And he was also a minus-15 for his 29 minutes on the floor. Advantage, Noah. “They’ve gone at each other a lot when we were in Chicago,” Derrick Rose said. “He’s a max-effort guy anyway, and he had some extra effort tonight.”
Said Noah: “We wanted to set the tone with our energy. We did that.”
Ten games is too early to call anyone a bust. Think about the first 10 games of Tino Martinez’s career as a Yankee (for the record: .132/.244/.158, with zero homers and two RBIs), and now look at how he’s greeted when he strolls into Yankee Stadium, like a Roman warrior back from the war.
But 10 games is plenty of time to worry, to fret, to wonder. That’s where Noah was Wednesday night. He has had his moments. He had 18 rebounds just the other night, against the Raptors in Toronto, and he’s reached double-figure rebounds in four games, had nine in another. He scored 16 points in his homecoming game against the Bulls in Chicago 12 days ago.
He’s also gone scoreless in three of those games. In the Knicks’ worst game of the year, at home against the Rockets, he has zero points and two rebounds. And when the Knicks beat the Mavericks on Monday night, he didn’t play one second in the second half, when the Knicks turned a threepoint halftime deficit into a 16-point win.
Look, he’s never going to frighten anyone with his offensive game. He missed five of the six free throws he attempted Wednesday. He missed four of his seven field-goal attempts, including a few layups. At one point, after bricking a wide-open 12-footer, a voice tumbled out of the Garden’s darkened mezzanine:
“PLEASE DON’T EVER SHOOT AGAIN THE REST OF THE YEAR!!!!”
Of course, by evening’s end, he’d won the fans back, fans who have shown a good deal of patience with him because they realize he is exactly the kind of player for whom the Garden falls hard. He really does play as hard as anyone in the league. Winning doesn’t just matter to him, it’s essential to how he views himself.
And he has made no secret of his affinity for the Garden, for the Knicks, and for New York, going back to his days as a kid rooting for some awfully good Knicks teams. That’s the blueprint for having Garden crowds chant your name, not curse at it.
“We’re not looking for him to be a big producer on the offensive end,” Hornacek said before the game, and that is a fortunate thing. Afterward he added, “He has to continue bringing the energy he brings.”
Detroit coach Stan Van Gundy was even more succinct: “Noah’s effort dominated the game. I thought Noah was as big a factor for them winning the game as [Kristaps] Porzingis was.”
Considering Porzingis’ 35-point career night, that is saying something. Saying far more than the stat sheet ever could.