We see it all the time in sports and yet it never fails to amaze: What seemed certain yesterday can feel shaky today and all but ridiculous tomorrow. Perception in sports is like the old joke about the weather in San Francisco: if you don’t like it, wait 10 minutes and it’ll change.
It was exactly two weeks ago when there was one certainty about the Knicks: They may not be genuine title contenders, but they were going to get after you for 48 minutes, they’d hammer you on the boards, and if you jumped them early in a game they were going to punch back until they regained their footing. It was this spirit that allowed fans beaten down by decades of deplorable basketball to embrace this team, tightly, with both their arms and their voices.
And now?
Well, three things happened along this merry road to a genuinely feel-good season.
1. The Heat lost their play-in game, so instead of matching up with the Celtics they got the Bucks. And for one game and most of another the Bucks didn’t have Giannis Antetokounmpo, and when he did play the Bucks played like they were terrified teenagers starring in a horror flick.
2. The Heat, who more or less mailed in the regular season, suddenly found themselves very much in play. And it’s fair to remember that the Heat were one wayward Jimmy Butler 3 shy of making the NBA Finals last year, with the two key principals — Butler and Bam Adebayo — back.
3. The Heat, the worst shooting team on the planet for 82 games, now have a seemingly endless roll call of sharpshooting assassins. They have retrieved two veterans, Kyle Lowry and Kevin Love, from regular-season witness protection. And they are coached by the best coach in the NBA, Erik Spoelstra.
And now, just two weeks after it looked like the Knicks were certain to be the NBA’s feel-good story of the year, there’s a very good chance that they’ll exit the playoffs with a bitter and sour taste in their mouths after six months of mostly sweet.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the Knicks vs. Heat NBA playoff series
- Vaccaro: Knicks’ failure to help Brunson is why their season’s over
- Knicks battle but fall in season-ending Game 6 loss to Heat
- Knicks couldn’t survive two minutes without Brunson
- Brunson’s heroic night spoiled by late turnover
If this were the Bucks on the precipice of a gentleman’s sweep, it would be a different story. The Bucks were the No. 1 seed. The Bucks have Giannis. The Bucks are a terrible matchup for the Knicks as presently constituted, the only East power against whom the Knicks didn’t play at least even in the regular season. Lose to the Bucks, even in five, you pack up your bags and stride proudly into summer, anxious for the next step in the process.
This is different. The Heat looked old and sluggish for so much of the year. The Knicks beat them when they had to in the regular season and, more important, had home-court advantage, which they coughed up immediately. And across 96 minutes in Miami since Saturday, they enjoyed a lead for exactly 24 seconds.
Forget who the Heat were a year ago. What they are now is a team with whom the Knicks, at worst, should be engaged in a tight struggle, not a one-way walkover. And both teams know well that by rights this series should already be over, as well as the Heat played the Knicks in Game 2, sans Butler.
And then there was this gem from Julius Randle late Monday night: “Maybe they just want it more.”
As often as Patrick Ewing used to offer empty guarantees back in the day, at least Knicks fans knew where Ewing’s heart was. Maybe this was just a heat-of-the-moment tongue cramp from Randle. But if he truly feels that way — and there has been little evidence to prove otherwise — then the sour and the bitter that would accompany a series loss will be multiplied. And a lot of it will be aimed at him.
Of course, as Monty Python said: The Knicks are not dead yet.
“One quarter at a time,” coach Tom Thibodeau said Monday. “One game at a time.”
There have been 13 teams who’ve climbed the mountain back from a 1-3 playoff deficit in NBA history. Of the first 11 — discount the Nuggets’ two such comebacks in 2020, because those games all happened in the neutral-site bubble — eight of the 11 teams had the same slight advantage the Knicks do: saving the season at home in Game 5, then closing the deal at home in Game 7.
So the Knicks — maybe even Randle — have to believe that if they can simply hold serve Wednesday, they’ll take their chances in Miami two days later, where the Heat will, for the first time these playoffs, have to play with at least a modicum of pressure on their shoulders. Perhaps if they can do that, if they can figure out a way to keep the season alive at least until Monday, some of the gathering bitterness and sourness can dissipate, and we’ll again feel differently about the 2022-23 Knicks than we do now. Perception really can change that quickly.
