A lifetime of habit invites happiness whenever those uniforms are getting tire tracks driven across them, right? You look down on the floor and you see those road green vestments, then you look up at the scoreboard and see a 30-point lead for the Knicks, and muscle memory — in the form of giddiness — takes over.
For a minute anyway.
And then you recognize how little you recognize, you see Rajon Rondo playing with strangers (and looking, still, like a whisker of his old self), you see Jeff Green flicking up bricks and a floppy-haired big named Kelly Olynyk, who looks like he reported to Boston once the Hanson reunion tour crashed and burned …
And look: There have been nights like this far too infrequently for the Knicks across this season’s first 45 games, nights when they’ve taken advantage of having superior firepower, when they’ve allowed a tanking team to actually tank by bludgeoning it early and stripping the mystery away. These victories are far too precious now, their status in the Eastern Conference far too precarious.
They’ll take this 114-88 victory and they’ll move on, with 37 more games to figure a way to make the playoffs, to eke in or sneak in or do whatever is required to keep the season going in April.
“We’re more committed now,” coach Mike Woodson said after his team’s third straight win. “We don’t have a lot of room for error now in moving up in our division and getting in the playoff hunt. There’s a sense of urgency now. We’re playing better basketball now.”
There is no tanking for these Knicks — even if it’s been hard to tell some nights — because there is no reward for tanking, there is no draft lottery awaiting them no matter how poor the record. This wasn’t supposed to be an issue; the Knicks were supposed to win enough to make their draft position not only moot but unappetizing.
It hasn’t quite worked out that way, and the great worry now is the Knicks won’t only be an in-season calamity, but a late June catastrophe, also. They have those 37 games to figure it out.
But the Celtics offered a splendid reminder that as good an idea as tanking — or, to put it a little less cynically, “being bad enough to make the college season more appetizing than your own” — seems in theory, in practice it’s a hard, grisly slog to endure. Not that we need any reminders. It wasn’t that long ago when the Knicks were having their own liquidation sale in the hopes of landing LeBron James.
You understand why teams do this.
“A good, old-fashioned butt-kicking,” is how Boston coach Brad Stevens described it. “I don’t think I have to describe it much. We all saw it.”
But watching them do this is hard on the eyes and harder on the soul. Not long ago the Celtics looked like the surprise team of the NBA, and Stevens looked like he just might have brought some pixie dust with him from Butler. They do own two wins over the Knicks, after all, including a 114-73 drubbing at the Garden on Dec. 8 that made this game look closer than that 6-OT Syracuse-UConn game from a couple of years back.
But that was many moons and several transactions ago, before Danny Ainge rearranged the tracks on this season, moves for which he was hailed when they happened and will again be praised if things work out in the next few drafts the way he hopes. Boston has nine first-round picks the next five years. It makes sense to do what they’re doing.
But there are no guarantees, there never are, and as bright as that future may seem these Celtics — and these Knicks — are still a reminder that today’s fickle certainty is still a better bet, on the whole, than tomorrow’s mystery. That’s how the Knicks have to believe, anyway.
“You have your lows, and you have to bounce back from them,” said Tyson Chandler, who looked as good as he has all year in collecting 12 points and 13 rebounds. “We’ve bounced back so far.”
They need this to be more than a mirage. There’s no tanking for this team. Even if, on some nights, the evidence insists otherwise.