Barbara Barker: Knicks face reenergized Celtics with return of Jayson Tatum
GREENBURGH — No one could have predicted this
No one could have predicted when we watched Jayson Tatum sob into a towel last May as he was wheeled to the visitors locker room that he would be back on the court at Madison Square Garden this season, let alone back on the court with a Celtics team that has emerged as the No. 1 obstacle to the Knicks having a deep playoff run.
Wasn’t this supposed to be a gap year for Boston? Instead, Jaylen Brown put the team on his back for the first 62 games of the season before being rejoined by Tatum, who has made a stunningly quick recovery from the torn Achilles he suffered in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference semifinals last season.
Thursday night’s game at the Garden will be the first between the two teams since Tatum returned to the court a month ago. For the Knicks, it will be a chance to see how they measure up against a Boston team that has gone 13-2 down the stretch with Tatum. And for the Celtics and Tatum, it will be an emotional trip back to the place they saw their championship aspirations painfully crumble last year.
“Yeah, I’ve thought about it,” Tatum said after the Celtics' win in Charlotte Tuesday. “I’m not like thrilled to go back and play there. Last time I played there, obviously it was a traumatic experience for me. Obviously, I knew that I would have to get over that hurdle and play there again. It’s going to have to be this Thursday, I’m not thrilled about it.”
The game is a potential playoff preview between two teams that right now are positioned to meet again in the second round of the playoffs. The Knicks, who have seen some high highs and some low lows this season, seem to have finally hit their stride with stars Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns both delivering offensively at the same time in a key win over Atlanta on Monday.
Towns, who scored 21 points on 9-for-12 shooting against Atlanta, said after practice Wednesday that the team is “in a good spot” and is looking forward to the challenge of going head-to-head with a Boston team that has its two biggest stars.
“As a player and a competitor you want to play against the absolute best the world has to offer in the game of basketball so to have him on the basketball court is an honor,” Towns said. “I want to go out there and test my skills against the best.”
[Tatum] is a star in our league and one of our best players, so when you have a person that demands that kind of attention, it opens up the game for others.”
With their two stars healthy, the Celtics present a formidable challenge.
“Both those guys are capable of erupting for 40 on any given night,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said. “They take the load off of each other when it comes to scoring which makes them extremely dangerous. Without Tatum, they were a really good team. With him, they are a really good team. So, we are going to have our work cut out for us.”
Brown, though, likes where his team is. The Knicks enter the game with 51 wins, the same amount they have finished with in each of the last two seasons. A win over the Celtics would give them their first season with at least 52 wins since the team went 54-28 in 2012-13.
“I feel like we are in a pretty good spot,” Mike Brown said. “As a coach you always want more, but at the end of the day we are in a pretty good spot right now.”
So are the Celtics, who might be looking for revenge for the way the Knicks ended their season last year. Though Tatum’s injury may have been the final nail in their playoff coffin, the Celtics lost control of the series, when they squandered big leads to lose the first two playoff games in Boston.
“I’ve said it felt like death to blow two 20-point leads,” Brown said this past week. “This story’s a little different this year. We might match up with the Knicks again and we got to be ready . . . You got to spin the block, you know what I mean. You have to run it back . . . I’m looking forward to the [playoffs].”
Not to mention one final matchup in the regular season.
Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.
