Listen, if you want, you can focus on who wasn’t playing at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. Anthony Davis did not play in The Garden. He hurt his calf in February and won’t be going to the Lakers for the next several weeks. The Lakers missed him, you bet.
LeBron James did not play in the Garden. He hurt his ankle in March. He has missed 12 games. They miss him too. The Lakers are 5-7 in those games, in the absence of two of the top five players on Planet Earth. They have been reduced. They are injured. They don’t look like the team that won the NBA title last fall or will defend it this summer.
If you want, of course. Concentrate on that.
But there was another team in the Garden on Monday night, and right now it’s a winning team again and again worthy of the attention of the city’s basketball-loving neighborhoods.
The Knicks beat the Lakers 111-96, and they are 28-27, and they took one more step to solidify themselves within the 10-team cutline to play a little extra basketball from next month. They keep playing with the cliff, keep driving right around the edge and are in danger of falling.
And somehow never do.
“This team has a belief,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said Monday, perhaps half an hour after his team happily sent most of the audience home and sent the Lakers part of it (probably 25 percent) home to check. think about what their team will look like when the varsity is intact again. “We can get it done.”
Six days ago, the Knicks looked like they were finally leaking too much oil after putting so much effort into their efforts to stay relevant, stay competitive, and stay within the .500 range. They lost back-to-back stomach-grinders in Brooklyn and Boston by a total of four points, leaving Memphis 13 ½ minutes late with 13.
If they were on the back nine, they’d spray their discs and chop their irons and sniff out the sand, and one of their play partners would be required by law to state that “the wheels are falling off.”
Except the wheels didn’t fall off.
Not Friday, when they strung together the most important 11½ minutes of the season along the track and in extra time against the Grizzlies. Not on Sundays, when they tried to donate a game to the Raptors before they reset it at the end. And not on Monday, when they stared at the vintage gold Lakers robes – still impressive no matter who wears them – and ran out of the yard – two days after the Lakers cleared the nets from Barclays Center.
“You go step by step,” said Thibodeau. “Some of those games where we ended up falling short we played extremely well. We see a different level of intensity as we go and hopefully we can learn along the way. You’re going to be overthrown, you have to pick yourself up and dust yourself off and go. “
Julius Randle had a ho-hum double-double (34 points, 10 rebounds), but one night when the laws of probability finally caught up with RJ Barrett (seven points, only 2-for-11 off the field), Elfrid Payton played his best game in weeks, 20 points and a plus-27 rating over 27 minutes. There was Nerlens Noel, who dictated the defensive story. There was a visit from vintage Derrick Rose, 14 points in 20 electric minutes.
Most of the time, there was a graininess that has become such an essential part of the team’s DNA. There has probably never been a Knicks couch so animated, or a roster that insists the love be spread.
Even Randle, regularly serenaded with chants from “MVP!” now that there are those who have been able to attest to his beautiful season, have admitted that the mantras are “cool”, but also that “winning is what motivates us.”
Payton said, “We’ve all been bought. We are all locked up. We all want the next guy to do well. Everyone plays for each other, there is no personal agenda. A target.”
There will come a point when the feel-good element of the season won’t be enough, when reality will set in what a joy it has been to watch this team rise and fall and rise again for four months. Perhaps that will still be in the balance of the regular season, which remains insidious. Maybe that’s over.
Listen, if you want, you can wait for the other shoe to drop or the sky to fall. Or you can just enjoy the ride. And be honest, it never hurts to see the Lakers walking off the floor on the wrong side of the hyphen. It doesn’t matter who is in the uniform.