By the end, there was exhaustion everywhere you looked at Madison Square Garden — on the basketball floor, on the benches, in the stands, both courtside and all the way up in the nosebleeds. When one final 30-foot heave from Miami’s Duncan Robinson clanged away harmlessly, the final buzzer sounded almost like a sigh of relief, a spokesman for everyone.
Knicks players began pulling their jerseys out of their shorts, and started the slow walk back to the locker room. All around the gym, fans exhaled for what felt like the first time in a half hour. For much of the night, it had felt as if this was going to be one of those games fans dragged with them to their cars, or to Penn Station, maybe all the way through a restless, sleepless night.
Instead, hoarse and happy and weary and satisfied, they will savor this 111-105 Knicks victory, they will gladly accept a 1-1 series heading to Miami for Games 3 and 4 (especially given the very real alternative), safe in the knowledge that no matter what happens in South Florida, there will be more basketball at the Garden this spring, at least one more game.
But now they are all allowed to hope for more. Because more is still possible.
Barely. But still possible.
“It was a hard-fought game,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “I thought in the second half we competed really well. We had a lot of guys step up and play really well.”
“It was a team win,” Julius Randle said, “that’s for sure.”
The Heat were pests all night, even without Jimmy Butler, who was wisely rested since Miami already got what it came for in the opener Sunday, and because he now will have three more days to rest his balky ankle back to health. The Heat led for most of the first 42 minutes of Game 2, and had reduced the Garden to a deathly dust bin of despair.
But then Jalen Brunson, nursing his own sore ankle, did what he has done so many times before this season: He carried the Knicks through a spate of sweaty moments in the third and the fourth quarters. Later, he was joined by his Villanova twin, Josh Hart, and Knicksanova delivered them all to the finish line.
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“Jalen was fantastic,” Thibodeau said, “and Josh was all over the floor.”
Brunson scuffled early. He looked a step and a half slow, was missing his usual swagger, could never get loose, could never catch fire. The Knicks were lucky that RJ Barrett had a huge first half (19 of his 24 points) and that Julius Randle, back from his own ankle miseries, was terrific all game long (25 points, 12 rebounds, eight assists).
Still the Heat kept coming. They grabbed the lead early, built it up, protected it, padded it to 93-87 with seven minutes left. The Garden was disconsolate. The Knicks looked gassed. The season looked spent.
But then Brunson knocked down a 3-pointer at the same time Isaiah Hartenstein was getting barreled over by Bam Adebayo. Hartenstein made the free throw to slice the lead to two. The Garden perked up again. And it seemed to fuel Brunson and his wingman, Hart. Starting with that 3, Brunson and Hart combined to score 20 of the Knicks’ final 24 points. Brunson finished with 30, shooting 6-for-10 from 3 and making nine of his final 13 shots. Hart was remarkable: 14 points, 11 rebounds, nine assists and a plus-16.
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And the Garden was transformed, one more night, Villanova’s Finneran Pavilion bleeding into Penn Plaza’s soul.
“Game 1 didn’t end how we wanted it to,” Hart said. “I’m not happy that we got the split but we’ll take this win. We responded today, we competed at a high level and got the win.”
Said Brunson: “We made a couple of more plays at the end of the game than they did. But I still have to be better.”
Most of the Knicks’ heavy lifting awaits them still. The fact that they were life-and-death with a Butler-free Heat team felt like a win for Miami, which gets the next two games at Kaseya Center. If the Knicks can sometimes hope to find a few friendly snowbirds in the Miami crowd in January and March, they’ll be outnumbered Saturday and Monday, bank on that.
Butler will almost surely be back. And the Heat’s buffet table of 3-point splashers aren’t going anywhere. The Knicks will have to be an awful lot better Saturday than they were Tuesday. There’s no disputing that.
But that’s for Saturday.
For now? There was one more grit-and-gasp special at the Garden, one more night when the Knicks pushed you to the brink of your wits before leaving you in a sapped heap, whether you were standing in the Garden or sprawled on your La-Z-Boy. They toyed with termination Tuesday, and lived to tell the tale. No apologies for hanging on, even if it was for dear life.
