Warriors-Knicks: Bad teams but a good game
SAN FRANCISCO — This is what keeps us interested, even when there’s no reason to be. Two bad teams playing a game that was very good, perhaps not technically but very much so emotionally.
The eternal line in sport is “you never know.” You never know when the last-place Knicks, who had lost 10 in a row, and the next-to-last place Warriors would compete as they did Wednesday night and play a game that makes you say, “I wish I was there.”
Especially if you owned one of those high-price Chase Center season tickets and weren’t there.
Yes, it was another Warriors loss, the Knicks winning 124-122, and now Golden State at 5-21 has replaced the 5-20 Knicks as the team with the worst record in the NBA.
So if you were looking for something that might be showing up on ESPN, this wasn’t it.
But for one game out of the 82-game schedule, for a night’s entertainment, it was terrific — the Warriors, looking unenthusiastic, down by 22 points just before half, tying the game on a seemingly impossible, virtually on the sidelines 3-pointer by D’Angelo Russell with 5.5 seconds left in regulation and then losing.
It was so terrible that just before intermission the fans booed, even though they should know, as Warriors coach Steve Kerr reminded that, with Klay Thompson and Steph Curry injured and a ton of kids on the roster, this will be a learning season.
With Russell, 32 points, showing why the Warriors took him in a sign-and-swap deal with the Brooklyn Nets for Kevin Durant, fans were celebrating after the fourth-quarter heroics.
The Knicks have been awful for the longest time, weeks, months, years, and only a few days ago in the usual desperation move by an organization that is caught between panic and ineptitude, New York fired head coach David Fizdale. On Wednesday night the new guy, interim coach Mike Miller, got his first win.
“We know there are tough stretches,” was Miller’s analysis of getting off the schneid, “but we are playing the right way, and we are putting ourselves in position to win.”
The Warriors are putting themselves in position to promote. The tenet in advertising is to sell the sizzle if you don’t have the steak. It was Star Wars night Wednesday at Chase. The Force wasn’t with the Dubs.
The Warriors switch uniforms from game to game; among the half dozen is the one that says “The Town,” supposedly honoring the community the Warriors fled after some 70 years to come to Chase. There’s also San Francisco, which was in use before Franklin Mieuli, the late owner, decided to switch to “The City.”
This is the marketing era, but one surmises that if Klay, Steph, Durant and Draymond Green could show up healthy, white T-shirts would be perfect attire.
The thinking was Curry and Russell would provide the offense this season, but Steph is out with that broken hand, and Russell has been limited by a thumb injury, missing numerous games.
But he was there against the Knicks, and if nothing else his 3-pointer will become part of Warriors history in a quite unhistorical season.
Asked how he created space for the shot, pinched between a defender and the sideline, Russell said, “Honestly, I feel like if I dribbled I would be helping him guard me. I was just trying to be as crafty as I can and get a shot up.”
Kerr was asked what if anything the Warriors learned from the game in this learning season.
“I think they learned it’s a long game," he said, "and there is lots of time to comeback. At halftime we were down 18, and we were sort of lifeless. We got back into the game petty quickly in the third quarter. That’s a good lesson for young players.”
The lesson for everyone is that any game can turn out to be a memorable one.