Barbara Barker: Knicks now have a tough series on their hands against Hawks
Knicks guard Jalen Brunson and the bench look on late in the fourth quarter against the Atlanta Hawks in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference First Round at Madison Square Garden on Monday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Fizzle. Gasp. Groan.
You could hear the energy escape from Madison Square Garden like the building was a punctured party balloon as the team blew a chance Monday night to take a commanding 2-0 lead in their first-round series against the Atlanta Hawks.
Not only did the Knicks waste a golden opportunity to send a message to the rest of the league. They did it in the most dismaying of ways, blowing a 12-point early fourth quarter lead to lose Game 2, 107-106.
There are no guarantees in a best-of-seven series, but there are heavy odds. And those odds would have been firmly in the Knicks favor if they hadn’t collapsed down the stretch of a game that they had controlled for nearly the entire night. Heading into this postseason, a team that jumps out 2-0 lead in a best-of-seven series has won 92.2% of the time.
Instead, like they were last year after losing Game 2 in their first-round series against Detroit, it appears that the Knicks are in for a battle. They are going to have to spend extra hours and energy figuring out how to beat Atlanta and CJ McCollum, who has now replaced Trae Young as the Garden’s favorite villain in a Hawk jersey after scoring six of his team’s final eight points Monday.
Of course, McCollum’s game-high 32 points weren’t the only thing that made this loss sting. How about the fact the Knicks missed 10 free throws including two by OG Anunoby that would have given the Knicks the lead back with 1:54 left. Or the fact they shot 5-for-22 and were outscored 28-15 in the final quarter?
“It’s all of it,” Josh Hart said. “It’s a game we should have won and in the playoffs you can’t give away games. We have to make sure we are locked in and watch the film and go in and battle for Game 3.”
It’s early and the Knicks still have plenty of time to recover and win this series. Still, by failing to take a 2-0 lead they have already handed an advantage to the Boston Celtics, the team that has quietly been plotting its revenge against the Knicks all season and is almost guaranteed to be their opponent if they get to the next round.
The way the Celtics manhandled Philadelphia in Game 1 of their first-round series, it would be no surprise if they finish it off in four games and had a chunk of extra time to start preparing for the Knicks.
Losing like this was almost like a bad case of deja vu for Knicks fans, given that the team did the same thing last year in their first round series against the Pistons. After winning the first game of that series when they went on 21-0 run in the first quarter, they lost a tight Game 2 to even the series.
That Knicks’ loss gave a young Pistons team the confidence they needed to make it a six-game series. It showed them they were good enough to beat a higher seed on their home court, something they were able to do again by winning Game 5 to take things back to Detroit.
The Knicks are going to come back here in this series, and it’s time they learned how to win in their own building.
For all the success the Knicks had last postseason, they were pretty unimpressive on their homecourt. The Knicks were 4-5 at MSG in the playoffs. They were 1-2 against Detroit, 2-1 in their stunning upset of the Boston Celtics, and 1-2 in their six-game loss to the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals.
They are now 1-1 this season in the Garden and looking for some answers as they head down to Atlanta.
“We just have to be better as team,” said Mikal Bridges who missed what would have been the winning shot at the buzzer. “We could have done better. We had a good lead and we just got to keep playing.
“We got to keep the full intensity the whole game.”
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.
