The Knicks didn’t post the greatest comeback in Garden history, but they sure tried.
The Knicks were embarrassed and humiliated for three quarters by a barrage of Shaquille O’Neal’s rim-rattling, hoop-bending dunks and Kobe Bryant’s acrobatic jumpers and finger rolls. Stuffing more highlight plays in those 36 minutes than had been seen at the Garden all season, the Lakers got up on the Knicks by 34 points late in the third and carried a 30-point lead (97-67) into the fourth quarter.
Over? Incredibly not. With Latrell Sprewell, Michael Doleac and Charlie Ward leading an offensive surge from the perimeter, the Knicks went on a 16-0 run to start the fourth and eventually closed to five points with 1:50 left. They even got as close as four points with four seconds left and the scare they threw into the Lakers late in their 114-109 loss enabled them to enter the All-Star break without their tails tucked between their legs.
Kobe Bryant scored 46 points; he had 40 after three quarters. O’Neal scored 33 points in a dunkathon that had some players complaining that he bent the rim. But the enduring image for the screaming Garden fans was the Knicks fighting back from the dead.
“You never know what could happen,” said Latrell Sprewell, who hit three 3-pointers in the fourth to finish with 24 points. “Anytime you’re in a game like that, you want to make it respectable. We didn’t let it go, we kept fighting.”
“It showed a lot of guts, pride and heart,” Don Chaney said. “They could have easily thrown in the towel.”
The Knicks, without Allan Houston (wrist) for the entire second half, left with their dignity intact. They outscored the Lakers 42-17 in the fourth, shot 58.6 percent and made 6-of-10 3-pointers. Doleac hit five-of-seven shots. “Everything we threw up went in,” Doleac said.
The Knicks’ largest fourth-quarter comeback ever was from 19 points down. Last night with 1:10 left, however, the dream died. Sprewell, with the Knicks trailing 107-102 and the Garden crowd going nuts, drove the lane, but O’Neal swatted away the floater.
After O’Neal hit one-of-two free throws to make it 108-102, Sprewell came back down with a chance to cut it to three points. He unleashed a 3-point airball on which he got hacked by Bryant. There was no call and no more comeback bid. “I got hit right on the forearm; I couldn’t follow through,” Sprewell said.
“It was impressive but I’m not going to wax eloquent about it,” Phil Jackson said of the Knicks’ surge. “It was a 30-point ball game. It was how many threes are they going to keep making. Eventually that was going to dry up.”
The Knick comeback was enough to get Bryant agitated on the bench, chewing out Russian Slava Medvedenko during a timeout. “Are you ready to play? No, you’re [bleeping not],” Bryant railed.
Before the fourth, Kobe and Shaq barely broke a sweat in destroying the Knicks, drawing gasps with their brilliance. Bryant, who had 22 points in the third quarter, put on one of the most electrifying performances the Garden’s seen in years as the Lakers moved above .500 for the first time. The Knicks enter the break 2 ½ games behind the eighth seed.
In the last 1:09 of the first half, the Lakers put on a Globetrotter-esque highlight show. Bryant raced past Sprewell on the right baseline and threw down a vicious reverse, right-handed dunk. The fans oohed and aahed. But they didn’t have long to savor the play because 30 seconds later, Robert Horry flipped an underhanded alley-oop feed for O’Neal, who rammed it home – the rim, backboard and camera atop the glass shaking violently.
Capping the first-half masterpiece, Bryant floated a 3-point shot from the left wing over Sprewell with .6 seconds left and the Lakers led 60-45.