PHILADELPHIA — There comes a point when you wish you could spike the players’ Gatorade with sodium pentathol, let the truth serum take a tour through their bloodstream and their consciences, loosen their lips and unlock their most honest opinions.
Instead, all we have are our eyes.
Instead, all we have are these five games that the Knicks have played under Mike Woodson, five games that look entirely different than the 42 that came before them, five games which have altered the way the Knicks look at themselves and the way the rest of basketball looks at them, too.
KNICKS DEFEAT FIRST-PLACE 76ERS
“I guarantee you that Miami and Chicago sure don’t want to see the Knicks at 7 or 8 [in the playoff race],” Philadelphia coach Doug Collins said, a few hours before he got an up-close look at this Knicks team that is so radically different from the old one they should have a new nickname. “I can tell you that.”
The Knicks beat the Sixers last night, 82-79, won their first close game under Woodson and chopped a game off the Sixers’ lead in the Atlantic Division.
Ten days ago, the mere idea of mentioning the Knicks in any kind of chase for first place would have been ludicrous, especially because 10 days ago they had just gotten thumped by these Sixers, 106-94, a Garden humiliation that was really the final message delivered by the players to their former coach, a listless, uninspired afternoon that felt like the final light extinguished in a disappointing season.
Of course, that was then. This is now. Though the players remain diplomatic in their quotes and their commentary, the rest of us have no such restrictions. Let’s get a few plain truths out of the way:
1. The Knicks are playing better. They are playing smarter. Every one of them: the stars and the subs, role players and featured players. Every one plays better now than they did a week ago. Every one. The starkest, of course, is Amar’e Stoudemire, who spent most of this season looking badly in need of a wheelchair or a walker, but who now seems to turn in one highlight-reel play every game, last night’s remarkable block of an Elton Brand shot the keeper.
2. The Knicks aren’t just playing better. They’re playing different. Where before they looked like basketball was a chore, now they play with a joie de vivre that’s only supposed to exist over in the college brackets. Seriously: It isn’t just that Carmelo Anthony (whose shooting struggles continued with last night’s 5-for-15) isn’t the primary option in crunch time; it’s that he clearly doesn’t mind, either.
3. They defend. They defend early (the Sixers were stuck on 5 through 10 minutes of the first quarter) and they defend late (every time the Sixers had a chance to tie or take the lead in the fourth quarter, the Knicks’ defense transformed into something out of 1994).
“Lots of defense, lots of rebounds,” Jeremy Lin said. “Lots of guts.”
“There is an urgency and a ferocity to us,” Tyson Chandler said.
Up and down the team you get euphemisms stacked upon euphemisms, and so nobody will actually say the two elusive statements that abound with crystal clarity now:
1. “We really like playing for Mike Woodson a lot.”
2. “We really didn’t like playing for Mike D’Antoni at all.”
Each game solidifies that point. Look, most coaching and managerial changes yield initial bursts of energy and prosperity. The Blazers fired their coach, Nate McMillan, then immediately walked into Chicago and beat the Bulls. But they were last spotted with tire tracks on their backs after getting butchered by the Bucks at home. It never lasts.
Only this one has. This is five in a row, with a chance to impossibly crawl back to .500 tomorrow night in Toronto. Three of those wins against playoff teams. Four of them blowouts, before last night, when they needed to play with focus and force to beat a first-place team. And did. In a way that would have been impossible to fathom not so long ago.
“We’re not playing for Mike Woodson,” Stoudemire said. “We’re playing for us.”
It’s just a different version of “us” than the one we saw until the Ides of March.