As the New York Knicks staggered off the floor and toward the
Barclays Center tunnel, looking very much like a team that had just lost a
sudden-death game, a fan edged up to a waist-high barrier and shouted words of
consolation never before heard in this basketball town.
"It's OK,
Manhattan," he cried. "Don't worry about it, Manhattan."
Tyson Chandler, among the
league's most accommodating players, was briefly stopped by a team official who
tried directing him back to the court for some postgame obligation before
Chandler waved his arm in disgust and kept on walking.
Carmelo Anthony wasn't far
behind him, and the same consoling fan leaned over the barrier and offered the
Knicks' exhausted star a fist bump. Anthony stuck out his left hand as the man
said, "One game, Carmelo. There's nothing to worry about."
Only there was plenty to worry
about as the Knicks boarded their buses out of Brooklyn as 96-89 overtime
losers, and as co-tenants with the 9-4 Nets atop the Atlantic Division
standings. Even the elitist Manhattanites who wanted to cling to their share of
first place had to concede that the Nets had just earned a head-to-head
tiebreaker advantage in a way their fans will never forget.
How many Brooklyn fans were
actually sitting and standing and stomping inside this alien mothership of an
arena Monday night? Nobody could break down the crowd of 17,732 with any degree
of certainty, but given the way booing Nets fans drowned out the M-V-P chants
for Melo, a fair estimate would be 10,000 for the good guys, 7,732 for the bad.
"Every time some sort of
Knick contingency started to cheer," Nets coach Avery Johnson would say,
"our fans got loud. And this is what we've been dreaming about since I
have been here."
Here meaning New Jersey for
starters, and the long, winding road to the abandoned home of the Dodgers and
the first Brooklyn-New York meeting of pro franchises since the Bums played the
Giants at the Polo Grounds in 1957.
The Nets were supposed to open
the season and their new building -- beautiful on the inside, not so much on
the outside -- on Nov. 1 before Hurricane Sandy forced a postponement and left
Johnson and his players waiting until Game No. 13, lucky No. 13 as it turned
out. The Nets showed the Knicks that they mean business, and that they mean to
steal some of the Knicks' business, too.
"With so much hype around
it," Joe Johnson said of the event, "we just came out and showed we
were the better team tonight."
Born right here in Brooklyn,
and more than willing to play along with a storyline and play down his move to
Baltimore at the ripe old age of 8, Anthony had a shot to play the homecoming
hero, or villain, in the final seconds of regulation. With the score tied Melo
rose up on Gerald Wallace, the Nets' stopper, and clanked a 16-footer off the
rim.
"I'll take that shot all
day," Anthony said. "I got a perfect look at it."
A tense, physical struggle
barreled into overtime before a sellout crowd loving every precious second of
it. If Knicks-Nets wasn't shaped by NBA Finals desperation, it did have the
feel of a critical first- or second-rounder, a hell of a thing to say about a
basketball game staged before the Jets are mathematically eliminated from the
playoffs.
The Nets would prove to be the
tougher, more durable team in overtime, when Jerry Stackhouse -- so old he
could play for the Knicks -- drained a 3-pointer from the corner that the
visitors never recovered from.
Deron Williams, good for 16
points and 14 assists, would steal the M-V-P chants from Melo in the end as
Knicks fans headed for the subways that would carry them home. Anthony finished
with 35 points and 13 rebounds in 50 minutes, the extreme length of his shift
showing just how much Mike Woodson's team wanted to take this game.
"Fatigue set in,"
Woodson said, a truth illustrated by Raymond Felton's 3-for-19 shooting
performance, one that surely made John Starks proud.
Chandler gave the Knicks 28
points and 10 rebounds in 45 minutes, barely outplaying Brook Lopez (22 and 11
and five blocks) and leaving a downcast Woodson to admit, "I needed about
three more Tysons tonight."
A former first-round pick of
the Knicks, Woodson said he'd never stepped foot in Brooklyn before Monday. No,
his virgin voyage to the borough is one that won't be easily forgotten.
Jason Kidd was out with back
spasms, an absence that couldn't be ignored. But the story of this game was
what the Nets had, not what the Knicks didn't.
Brooklyn showed the same grit
and resolve that defined their coach when he won a championship as quarterback
of the San Antonio Spurs. Johnson warned his players afterward, "There are
no parades, there are no trophies right now," even if someone with a
Steinbrennerian stomach for the intra-city fight would've wanted to hand the
Nets the Mayor's Trophy right then and there.
The Nets have a ton going for
them. They have contending talent (at last), a royal first couple (Jay-Z and
Beyonce) for front-row face time on national TV, and enough loyal customers to
shout down the same Knicks fans who once owned the arenas in Jersey.
"The atmosphere in here
was unbelievable," Anthony said. "It was a special place to
play."
Melo batted away the
suggestion that Brooklyn could pose a serious challenge to the Knicks' playoff
designs by saying the Nets "are not somebody we're looking at every day
and tracking their stats." But that is about to change.
The Nets became the first
Eastern Conference opponent to beat the Knicks, and the home team pulled it off
Monday night in a game, Chandler said, "where both teams understood what
was at stake."
So the Knicks should be afraid
of Brooklyn, very, very afraid. They shouldn't worry so much about getting out
of the East, not when there's suddenly a real reason to believe they might not
get out of New York.
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