Listen, if you want, you can focus on who isn’t playing at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. Anthony Davis does not play in the Garden. He injured his calf in February, will not return to the Lakers for a few more weeks. The Lakers missed him, I bet.
LeBron James does not play in the Garden. He injured his ankle in March. He missed 12 games. They also miss him. The Lakers are 5-7 in those games, missing two of the best players on planet Earth. They are diminished. There are people injured. He doesn’t look like the team that won the NBA title last fall or will defend it this summer.
If you want, sure. Focus on that.
But there was another team at the Garden on Monday night and, for now, it is again a winning team and once again worthy of the attention of the basketball-loving sections of the city.
The Knicks defeated the Lakers 111-96, 28-27, and took another step toward solidifying in the 10-team lineup to play a little extra basketball starting next month. He continues to play with the rock, he continues to drive right along the edge, continuing to threaten that they will overturn.
And somehow he never does.
“This team has a faith,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said Monday, perhaps half an hour after his team sent the home crowd home and the Lakers (probably 25 percent) home to ponder what it will look like. their team when the university returned intact. “We can do it.”
Six days ago, the Knicks seemed to be draining too much oil after spending so much energy trying to stay relevant, to stay competitive, to stay within the .500 spit range. They lost heartbreaks in Brooklyn and Boston with a total of four points, then followed Memphis by 13 to 6 ½ minutes to the end.
If they were on the new back, they would spray their units, throw them out of the iron and throw them out of the sand, and one of their playmates should, by law, state that the “wheels are falling”.
Only the wheels didn’t fall.
Not on Friday, when they collected the most important 11 ½ minutes of the season on stretch and in extra time against the Grizzlies. Not on Sunday, when they tried to offer a Raptors game before stealing it back in the end. And not Monday, when they looked at the Lakers’ vintage gold clothing – still imposing, no matter who wears it – and took it out of the garden – two days after the Lakers took the Nets out of the Barclays Center.
“Go step by step,” Thibodeau said. “Some of those games where I didn’t succeed in the end I played extremely well. We see a different level of intensity as we go down the stretch and hope we can learn as we go. You’re down, you have to get up and get dusty and leave. ”
Julius Randle had a double-double ho-hum (34 points, 10 rebounds), but on a night when the laws of probability finally reached RJ Barrett (seven points, just 2 for 11 off the field) , there was Elfrid Payton played the best game in recent weeks, 20 points and a plus-27 in 27 minutes. It was Nerlens Noel who dictated the defensive narrative. There was a visit from the vintage Derrick Rose, 14 points in 20 electric minutes.
For the most part, there was a mistake that became such an essential part of the team’s DNA. There has never been such a lively Knicks bank or list to insist that love will be spread.
Even Randle, serenaded regularly with chants of “MVP!” now that there are people who are allowed to testify about his magnificent season, they have acknowledged that mantras are “cool,” but also that “winning is what motivates us.”
Payton said: “We are all bought. We are all locked up. We all want to see the next man well. Everyone is playing for each other, there are no personal agendas. A purpose.”
There will come a time when the common sense element of the season will not be enough, when reality will penetrate what a pleasure it was to see this team growing and falling and growing again for four months. Maybe this will still come in the balance of the regular season, which remains treacherous. Maybe that’s beyond it.
Listen, if you want you can wait for the other shoe to fall or the sky to fall. Or you can simply enjoy the ride. And to be honest, it’s never a bad thing to see the Lakers come off the floor on the wrong end of the hyphen. It doesn’t matter who is in uniform.