The Knicks Offered a Glimpse of What They Want to Be

For five minutes, a 21-0 run allowed us to see things we never saw in the regular season.

At 9:10 left in the fourth quarter, Cam Payne dashed to the paint. Screw what happens in the regular season when you are talking about the playoffs — the playoffs are built on heroics from contributors you wouldn’t expect — but there was nothing that Knicks fans saw out of Payne in the first 82 games that made them want to see him when things mattered most. Payne is not supposed to be the main foil in a Detroit newspaper, nor the hero in a New York rag. I remembered him as the “player that used to dance with Russell Westbrook on the Thunder”, despite him making a career out of giving teams solid minutes at the backup point guard position. Still, here he was, accelerating to the paint with his right hand. It was a bucket that the team desperately needed. The tide needed to be turned. The bucket over Malik Beasley and Isaiah Stewart’s long arms cut the Knicks’s deficit to five. As he got up, he yelled at Dennis Schroder — always an irritant — “We here! Yeah, we here. Fuck you talking about?”

For most of the third quarter, hell, for the most of the game, the Knicks were on their heels against a Pistons team that is everything that everyone in Detroit said they are. To be on a road team in the playoffs means that you must play with unbridled confidence and the Pistons had that, while punching the Knicks in the mouth with physicality that made me worry every time Jalen Brunson made a cut on his bum ankle. Malik Beasley was a weapon. Ausar Thompson is a sensational athlete, who can catch alley-oop passes even if there is a player that is breathing down his back; Cade Cunningham, struggled at times against OG Anunoby’s length, is still a franchise player. Although the talk about him being the best player on the floor might have been an overly bullish statement, and a conservative read on Jalen Brunson’s height, he’s still a handful for the Knicks. When they found themselves down late in the third quarter and early in the fourth quarter, it wasn’t shocking, so much as it was exhausting. Knick fans are watchful people; we saw a loss coming.

When’s the last time you felt confident in a Knicks team, enough to know that they were coming back? Maybe last season, when their toughness would wear teams down. But, this season? They’re more talented, more skilled, and much less eager to bang. Is it because of Karl-Anthony Towns’s finesse? Are they missing Donte DiVincenzo? This year’s team is different, a pretender that is trying to contend as opposed to a scrapy upstart. It was that kind of a season for the Knicks: the defense was borderline; the team didn’t inspire the devotion that the previous team had. The fans were not happy. Podcasting seemed to be the sui generis nature of the team.

It would not be out of the question to wonder whether this team could come back from a deficit in the playoffs. Then, it happened. Basketball happened. They showed fight, refused to let a young team out-gun them, forced them to play half court basketball. If basketball is a game of runs, then Dr. Naismath would have been joyful when watching this game. On defense, Karl-Anthony Towns stood tall like a street soldier in an interrogation room; Jalen Brunson, who started the game 2-13, finally broke the Pistons defense. Cam Payne drilled a three after that layup. A 21-0 run for the ages, where the fans got loud, got astrominically deafeaning. On that crowd, although I can be hard on the type of fans that come to Knicks games (if I have to hear another stupid Trae Young or Embiid chant, then I will drive up to MSG and almost pull a Luigi; keyword, almost): The Garden can be populated by people who can afford to go to the game, the same people that probably wear Kith despite the prices and despite the fact that you can get cooler clothes on East Fordham Road. The style that the corporate Knicks have chosen to embrace notwithstanding, the crowd was rapturous when the Knicks went on their run. From the television screen, all I could do was hope that I was there. They might have been stale in the regular season, but they’re now in the playoffs? With great power — home court advantage — comes a need to be loud.

For that quarter, Knicks fans saw the team that we were promised had every idea that Leon Rose and the rest of the Knicks brass had when they sent Donté and Julius Randle away for Towns. There’s still issues with the team against these guys: Mikal Bridges played soft, and it makes sense that Tom Thibodeau did not have him on the floor for the final few minutes. Jalen Brunson’s ankle is still a problem; and, we probably won’t get a game like that from Cam Payne again. The Pistons will be quick to correct their fourth quarter mistakes, and you can guarantee that Cunningham will play better in the first half in Game 2. Still, this was a great win: the Knicks excelled in the ways they want to excel in. For a while there, in the midst of madness, in the midst of the New York sidewalk, I had forgotten how frustrating the regular season was.