The Basketball Sublime

Everything is terrible--except the Knicks

Every once in a very great while sport attains the level of myth. Bobby Thomson’s 1951 “Shot Heard ‘Round The World.” The U.S. Olympic hockey team’s 1980 “Miracle On Ice.” Seabiscuit’s victory over War Admiral in the 1938 Pimlico Stakes. It is, of course, too soon to know whether last night’s Knicks victory will reach that exalted pantheon. Perhaps fans will consign it to the lower tier of gloriously improbable events like the wounded Kirk Gibson’s walk-off home run in the 1988 World Series. I will say this: I have never seen a greater sports event in the sixty-five years that I have been a fan. And this: the game showed us why sports, for all the money and corruption and cynicism, remain a marvelous human endeavor.

I have been so transported by the version of the Knicks that has materialized in the playoffs that I had earlier planned to write what would have been a very different post. Those Knicks posted the greatest winning streak in the history of the NBA, including the regular season. They won thirteen consecutive games by a total of 273 points, for an average margin of 21 points. I had planned to write a piece about the flow, the harmonious action, that the Knicks had attained–a kind of basketball sublime. A team without a true superstar had become a single organism, reacting in real time to every challenge thrown at them on the court.

Those Knicks were very real; but the streak itself was a kind of false positive. The Knicks are not better than everyone else. This version, led by the undersized and indomitable Jalen Brunson, have specialized in winning when they shouldn’t. As my son Alex, a far more ardent fan than I, said two years ago, when the Knicks were in the midst of yet another fifty-odd-game-win season that would take them midway through the playoffs, “The Knicks are good at winning.” The team had a belief in itself that seemed to be greater than its actual talent.

That is not the story we tell about New York sports franchises. The Yankees win because they spend–or used to spend–more money than their competitors. The Mets and the Nets disgrace themselves by splurging on yesterday’s stars and then subsiding to mediocrity. To the small-market teams like the Oakland Athletics and the small-town teams like the Green Bay Packers we ascribe–rightly–a moral dimension that comes of overcoming disadvantage. New York teams rarely seem to deserve their success.

Before the arrival of Brunson in the 2022-3 season, the Knicks almost incarnated moral unworthiness. Their owner, James Dolan, had succeeded the late George Steinbrenner as The Most Hated Man in Sports. He had banned a great Knicks star from Madison Square Garden, which he owns. He had insisted on terms that had frustrated all attempts to rebuild Penn Station, which the Garden sits atop. He had meddled with his own hirelings to make the Knicks so dysfunctional that no great player would agree to join the team. Then Dolan hired a new team president, Leon Rose, who oversaw the assembling of the current team. But Dolan is still the jerk who pals around with The Greater Jerk who runs our country.

This brings me to The Game, and why I regard it as transcendent. By the end of the first quarter, the game had a meaning, and every Knicks fan knew what it was: The Refs Stole It. I do not subscribe to any of the conspiracy theories that purport to explain why, for example, the refs overturned an early foul call on the Spurs’ superhuman center, Victor Wembanyana (hereafter “Wemby”) and instead called the foul on the man he was guarding, Knicks center Karl Anthony Towns (hereafter “KAT”), sending Towns to the bench with two fouls after one minute of play. This decision initiated the avalanche that buried the Knicks under a 19-point deficit at the end of the first quarter. But it was one of perhaps five adverse calls. As I rode down the elevator this morning, a neighbor who I didn’t know got on. It took only a floor or two for him to roll his eyes and say, “The double goal-tend.”

Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, Knicks fans will need only say “the double goal-tend” to elicit a wince. What it meant to all of us was that the Knicks, this team of destiny that was to finally bring back the championship banner to our city after an interval of fifty-three years, was to falter under a curse. The Spurs would draw even at two games apiece and, with the wind in their sails, might well coast to the championship. Alex stopped watching a few minutes into the second quarter, at 47-25; it was just too painful. I lasted a little longer, and then retired to the living room to distract myself with a book.

I came back to my den midway through the third quarter with the Knicks down 25. The lead had been 29. (On the subway this morning a conversation broke out among strangers. “29? Was it 29?”) The Knicks whittled it down to 15 and then stalled. They hoisted up desperate shots against the asphyxiating Spurs defense. The game had taken on a new meaning: The refs had put us in such a deep hole that even the vaunted Knucks spirit would not avail.

And then the unimaginable fourth quarter. Thirteen. . .ten. . .seven. I still didn’t believe. I texted Alex: “Good for game 5 if nothing else.” Then four, then seven. Still four and a half minutes left. The law of averages was taking its revenge on the Spurs, who could not miss a shot in the first half. But something else, slowly dawning: these Knicks, who had been through so much together, believed in themselves even when we didn’t. Or maybe the gods finally placed their thumb on the scale. Two players who had been silent–KAT and Jose Alvarado–made three-point shots they shouldn’t have taken. Wemby, a preposterously good free-throw shooter at seven-foot-something, missed two.

The Knicks finally inched ahead, and then Josh Hart, who never, ever misses an open layup, did. And then the Spurs hit two free throws to go up by one with nine seconds left. Fate. And then came the indelible moment that not only won the game but vaulted it into the realm of glory. How many times have we watched it? Brunson takes a desperation shot from way out in the gloaming and everyone on both teams looks up at the rim–except O. G. Anunoby, far out near mid-court, who sees a great blue channel opening up before him, sprints towards the basket, arriving exactly as the ball bounces off the rim, and then stretches, and stretches yet a little more, until he reaches the ball with the tip of the fingers on his right hand and steers it, or maybe prays it, into the basket with 1.2 seconds remaining. And I, and perhaps you, and many people we know, start screaming uncontrollably at our television.

They are the team of destiny.

It would be fair to say that this game–unlike, say, Jesse Owens’ four Olympic gold medals won before Hitler at the 1936 Olympics–has no larger historical significance. It was just a great basketball game. But I bid you remember one thing: Donald Trump attended Game 3, the only one the Knicks have lost. Many Knicks fans believe that our evil overlord put a hex on the team. He was not present for this game. The Knicks would not give him that satisfaction. This one was for us.