Morbid curiosity is not normally a healthy reason to commit to a form of entertainment, but also you don't necessarily have a say in the matter. Sometimes the morbid part just jumps in front of your face, grabs your eyelids, yanks them down and then snaps them back up like a senior-center window shade.
Which brings us to Thursday night's Game 6 of the Knicks-Hawks series, which was not much as a basketball game but sure put the "more" in "morbidity." New York went to Atlanta facing a team with a puncher's chance of forcing a seventh game and instead won so convincingly that a case can be made that the Knicks actually won the series in five games, because the sixth game had to have been some sort of busted AI hiccup.
Not that it started that way, mind you. Even the least convincing computer-generated nonsense begins with a notionally believable premise, but eventually the seams and joints show up and you realize that you've been kinetically bullshitted. That point was Jalen Johnson's midrange jumper with 8:11 left in the first quarter, which gave the upstart Hawks an 11-9 lead. Everything was possible at that moment, and the sellout crowd believed the best was to come. Five minutes later, the game was over—spectacularly, irrevocably, absurdly over. It got colossally worse from there, as things do.
The Hawks allowed the Knicks, and that is the most accurate way to put this, to score 14 straight points. Then nine straight. Then 16 straight. Then 12 straight. Then 10 straight. After that, they pretty much played the Knicks even, but that 63-11 run, which turned an 11-9 Hawks lead into a 72-22 deficit WITH 4:39 REMAINING IN THE FIRST HALF, generally inhibited the Hawks from being their truest selves. Or, if you choose, revealed that true self in the most shameful possible nudity. I mean, there's no convincing way to make 140-89 look competitive, but it is at least imaginable. 63-11 is a fifth-grade CYO score. This game was on ESPN. Children could have watched it.
Put another way, if paid professionals allow the opponent in an important game to make 25 of 33 shots, some of that is clearly a defensive problem. If only six of those baskets come from beyond the arc, that team isn't defending at all. If the only way you can break a 63-11 run by the other team is by getting one of their guys into a fight, you aren't really bothering to do anything at all.
That bit of unpleasantness, which saw Mitchell Robinson of the Knicks get snippy with Atlanta's Dyson Daniels (and vice versa, to be fair) and led to both getting tossed, also saw referee Brian Forte get trucked in an absurd attempt to convince both parties to let bygones do what they do. That tussle meant that both the tantalizing possibility of and the momentum toward the Knicks putting up 100 in the first half was, sadly, lost, although the 83 they did manage by halftime seemed to establish the theme of the evening. Because the Knicks only "won" 68-67 from that set-to through to the end of the game, it seems fair to say that the nation was treated to the most preposterous 15 and a half minutes of playoff basketball ever performed, and that the acme of achievement in that span for the Hawks was getting one of their starters ejected.
It was rather a shame, too, because Game 6 on your home floor is supposed to guarantee a level of grit through desperation that allows a team and its fans to dream of shocking the world. Atlanta had been considered a lively enough underdog, even if the two games that they did win were by one point each; your keener observers will note that the Knicks had won their three by 11, 16, and 29 points.
Either way, you could hope, at least until you decided that hope was too high a price to pay for getting the season over with and catching the morning flight to Cabo. And the Hawks went home with an oak leaf-clustered flourish.
The long-term ramifications of this game are, of course, none. The Knicks now begin prep for either the Boston Celtics or Philadelphia 76ers, who will play Game 7 of their series Saturday night, bless their little hearts. The Knicks will either be a very live underdog in Boston or a considerable favorite at home against Philadelphia. They will also be well rested, as none of their starters played as many minutes in the second half as Ariel Hukporti. Every game you don't have to play at this time of year is a good thing if you have championship aspirations, but the benefits of that don't really kick in this early. Plus, if it's Celtics-Knicks, historical animosities and the Celtics' general postseason ownership of the Knicks will kick in without much prodding. We will forget that 63-11 ever happened, because more basketball will be stacked atop it.
But of course we won't actually forget it. From the moment you first checked your phone and saw "Knicks 45, Hawks 15," you knew something weird was happening; by 62-19, you surely were sold. You had to see what was going on, and then it was 72-22 while Robinson and Daniels were in each other's faces offering to mutually rearrange the other's. In fact, if the Knicks win Game 1 of their next series, which is certainly possible, you will know someone who says, "Yeah, that was good, but they didn't play as well as they did on Thursday." They'll be right, but they'll also be ridiculous. And that's how the playoffs are watched—with people you would pay to avoid.
