{"id":225527,"date":"2021-04-13T06:51:19","date_gmt":"2021-04-13T03:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/the-knicks-refuse-to-go-away\/"},"modified":"2021-04-13T06:51:19","modified_gmt":"2021-04-13T03:51:19","slug":"the-knicks-refuse-to-go-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/the-knicks-refuse-to-go-away\/","title":{"rendered":"#The Knicks refuse to go away"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#The Knicks refuse to go away<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

Listen, if you want you can focus on who wasn\u2019t playing at Madison Square Garden Monday night. Anthony Davis wasn\u2019t playing at the Garden. He hurt his calf in February, won\u2019t rejoin the Lakers for another couple weeks. The Lakers missed him, you bet.<\/p>\n

LeBron James wasn\u2019t playing at the Garden. He hurt his ankle in March. He\u2019s missed 12 game<\/a>s. They miss him, too. The Lakers are 5-7 in those games, absent two of the five best players on Planet Earth. They are diminished. They are wounded. They do not resemble the team that won the NBA title last autumn or will defend it this summer.<\/p>\n

If you want, sure. Concentrate on that.<\/p>\n

But there was another team at the Garden Monday night, and for the moment it is once again a winning team and once again worthy of the attention of the basketball-loving precincts of the city.<\/p>\n

The Knicks beat the Lakers 111-96, and they are 28-27, and they took another step toward solidifying themselves inside the 10-team cutline to play a little extra basketball starting next month. They keep toying with the cliff, keep driving right along the edge, keep threatening to topple over.<\/p>\n

And somehow never do.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis team has a belief,\u201d Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said Monday, maybe half an hour after his team sent most of the crowd home happ<\/a>y and the Lakers portion of it (probably 25 percent) home to ponder what their team will look like when the varsity is back intact. \u201cWe can get it done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Six days ago, the Knicks looked like they were finally leaking too much oil after expending so much energy to trying to stay relevant, stay competitive, stay within spitting range of .500. They lost back-to-back stomach-grinders at Brooklyn and at Boston by a total of four points, then trailed Memphis by 13 with 6 \u00bd minutes to go.<\/p>\n

\"Julius
Julius Randle chats with Anthony Davis following Monday\u2019s Knicks game.<\/figcaption>
AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If they were on the back nine, they\u2019d be spraying their drives and chunking their irons and whiffing out of the sand, and one of their playing partners would by law have to mention that \u201cthe wheels are falling off.\u201d<\/p>\n

Except the wheels didn\u2019t fall off.<\/p>\n

Not Friday, when they strung together the most important 11 \u00bd minutes of the season down the stretch and in overtime against the Grizzlies. Not Sunday, when they tried to gift a game to the Raptors before stealing it back at the end. And not Monday, when they stared at the vintage gold Lakers vestments \u2014 still imposing, no matter who\u2019s wearing them \u2014 and ran them clear out of the Garden \u2014 two days after the Lakers had run the Nets clear out of Barclays Center.<\/p>\n