Fizzle. Gasp. Groan.
You could almost hear the energy escape from Madison Square Garden like the building was a punctured party balloon Monday night as the team blew a chance to take a commanding 2-0 lead in their first-round series against the Atlanta Hawks.
Not only did the Knicks blow 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, at Madison Square Garden.
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 they had controlled for a good three quarters.
Heading into this postseason, a team that jumps out 2-0 lead in a best-of-seven series has won 92.2 percent of the time. Of the 359 series that started with one team winning both games, the losing team has come back to win just 28 times. The odds even get better when you consider that in a first-round series of any length, only 14 teams out of a possible 228 opportunities (6.1 percent) have come back after losing the first two games.
Instead, like they were last year after losing Game 2 in their first-round series against Detroit, it appears that the Knick are in for a battle. They were going to have to spend extra hours and energy figuring out how to beat Atlanta. And even if they figure out a way to do that, 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 in the next round.
Jalen Brunson seemed to know what kind of opportunity and challenge the Knicks faced heading into Game 2.
“We’ve just got to be ready for them,” Brunson said after the Knicks’ won the opening game of the series. “You just know that teams usually bounce back after a loss, and so we’ve got to be ready to up our intensity, up our physicality and just be ready to match theirs. They’re a good team, they’re well-coached and they’re going to be ready to go.”
The way the Celtics manhandled Philadelphia in Game 1 one of their first-round series, it would be no surprise if they finish it off in four games. No one is saying that’s what the Knicks will do – anything can happen in Atlanta – but they could have flexed a bit of muscle last night by taking a 2-0 lead in the series.
It’s something that the Knicks wanted to do.
“It’s huge, it sets a tone for the rest of the series,” Miles McBride said about wanting to come out and send a strong message at home. “You come out against a physical team like they are, they’re a great team and we have a lot of respect for them. You want to set the tone early.”
The Knicks likely thought they had done this last year when they whipped off a 21-0 run in the fourth quarter to beat the Detroit Pistons in Game 1 of their first-round series at the Garden. And then they opened the door to a long series by losing Game 2.
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.
Now, it appears they have done the same thing for the Hawks, letting CJ McCollum whip off six straight Atlanta points late in the lead to give his team the lead for good.
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 Madison Square Garden in the playoffs – going 1-2 against Detroit, 2-1 in their stunning upset of the Boston Celtics, and 1-2 in in their six-game loss to the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals.
They are now 1-1 this 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.
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