INDIANAPOLIS — The rest of the league kept waiting for this. Surely there would come a day when everything would catch up to the Knicks: the injuries, and the heavy workload, and the endless string of down-to-the-buzzer stress fests. Surely there would come a reckoning for all of this ratcheting.
Sunday came the reckoning.
Sunday, the tax collector arrived at Gainbridge Fieldhouse. In a heartbeat, the Pacers were up 10, and in an eyeblink it was 15. It was 20 by the end of the first quarter. It reached 30 by the end of the half. It ended 121-89, but in truth that could have been whatever Rick Carlisle had wanted it to be.
“We fell behind early and didn’t respond well,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “We have to fix it and get ready for the next one. Have to fix it.
“We started slowly, they made shots and got a big lead and it snowballed. Now we’ve got to respond.”
The Knicks had won six of their first nine playoff games — and easily could’ve won two of the games they’d lost, kneecapped by a couple of 30-foot prayers — and so often it seemed they did this while pieced together with Scotch tape and paper clips and riverbank mud. Sunday the mud dried up. The tape turned to ribbon.
They looked exhausted. They looked beaten, even before they were beaten, but that happens in the NBA, happens sometimes in the playoffs. History is littered with teams who survived bloodlettings like this one. The Lakers, famously left for dead in 1985 after the Memorial Day Massacre, are the patron saint of lost causes like that.
Now the Knicks must find the other side of the Mother’s Day Massacre.
“We can talk about fresher legs, give us all the pity we want,” said Jalen Brunson, who spent the game’s final 15 minutes stewing on the bench, biting his towel and stealing periodic, disbelieving glances at the scoreboard. “Yeah, were short-handed but that doesn’t matter right now. We have what we have, we have to go forward with no excuse.”
He paused.
“No excuse whatsoever.”
It gets no easier. OG Anunoby is still in the pool; it’s hard to believe we’ll see him again in this series. Brunson refuses to blame his bum ankle, and that’s admirable, but the proof is in the push-off: he has a fraction of his usual lift. His shots, inside and outside and at the foul line, are uniformly short. Josh Hart finally looked like one of those marathoners who takes the final lap bent over sideways. Isaiah Hartenstein banged up his shoulder.
“We didn’t come out with the right energy for a game like this, we needed to be flying around, needed to be physical,” Hart said. “I’m supposed to be the energy guy on this team and I didn’t do it. I did nothing.”
If the Knicks were a weak team emotionally, it might be worth circling the nine-point lead they held in the fourth quarter of Game 3, when they were about two solid minutes away from throwing a padlock onto this series. It might be worth fretting that losing that game served as a gateway drug to Sunday’s slaughter, and might portend doom for what to expect at the Garden Tuesday night.
But that is the one area where they aren’t hamstrung. You know the Knicks are going to digest Sunday’s thrashing precisely as they should: that it only counts for one, that winning by 32 doesn’t give the Pacers a bonus. The Knicks played 82 games to get these two games at home: Game 5, and (if necessary) Game 7.
They may not win those games. They may not win on Tuesday.
It’s hard to believe we’ll see what we saw Sunday. Sunday felt like the first long drive you take after a good ice storm, where you avoid every pothole the whole way home … and then you hit the last one before the driveway and the transmission falls out. It felt like this had to happen at some point. And look: the other team isn’t exactly the ’73 76ers, OK? They’re good. They’ve been on a roll at home. And realize their hardest task is still ahead of them.
“All we did,” Tyrese Haliburton said, “was do our jobs. We won two games at home.”
Said Hart: “This was a letdown. But the series is still tied.”
The buzz off this game may make it feel like the Pacers are coming back up 2 ½ games to 2, but it doesn’t work that way. Tuesday will be something to behold. Game 5s usually are. Game 5 is when Reggie first became Reggie, when Hubert Davis made a couple of eternal free throws. Game 5 is when Patrick Ewing beat the buzzer with a drive, and, well, yes … when Charles Smith never quite got the ball to the basket.
Game 5 looms now, tied at 2, the Pacers flying and the Knicks flailing. Tuesday at 8 is going to be something. And only a fraction of what Tuesday at 11 will feel like. One way or another.