INDIANAPOLIS — We know the script so well by now. We’ve seen how the Knicks finish these games, it’s become as familiar as “The Honeymooners” used to be: the same 39 episodes, over and over, the same pratfalls, the same one-liners, and Alice always kisses Ralph in the end.
The game was right where the Knicks wanted it: close and late.
Make a play. Win a game. Go back to the hotel. Hop in a whirlpool for an hour.
Except a funny thing happened.
This time, with a 50-50 ball in the air, it wasn’t the Knicks who came down with it. Tyrese Haliburton — unstoppable all night until he tweaked an ankle late — took an open 3 in a tie game, 34.1 seconds to go. It hit a few hands.
It landed in Aaron Nesmith’s.
Reset for Indiana. Haliburton again. Deuce McBride played him tight, daring him to let someone else carry the night for the Pacers. Before the ankle, Haliburton might’ve tried to blow by McBride. Couldn’t now. The shot clock bled away. Seventeen-thousand voices murmured. Haliburton finally passed off.
He found Andrew Nembhard.
Nembhard: former Florida Gator, former Gonzaga Bulldog, 1-for-7 on the night, who’d bricked a long 3 just a minute earlier. The clock reached 2. The clock reached 1. Nembhard heaved one from 31 feet, a H-O-R-S-E prayer that left his fingers half a heartbeat before the shot clock buzzer.
Knicks boxed out. Knicks tracked the ball. They’d been beaten to the last ball, and had in fact surrendered more second-chances than usual. They weren’t going to be beaten to this one. They waited for the ball to carom away.
“And then,” Isaiah Hartenstein said, “it went in.”
It went in. It was 109-106, Pacers, on the way to 111-106 Pacers, on the way to Indiana getting on the board in these Eastern Conference semifinals, slicing the Knicks’ advantage to 2-1, holding serve by their fingernails with a chance to reduce things to a best-of-three on Mother’s Day afternoon.
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“We kept getting the ball,” Pacers coach Rick Carlisle said, “and kept getting the ball, and kept getting the ball. That was the thing.”
The Pacers had threatened to run away and hide early in the game, and again early in the third. The Knicks had roared back, had turned 67-58 down to 90-85 up by quarter’s end, then pushed the lead as high as nine, 98-89, with 9 ½ to go. The Pacers came back.
“Give them credit,” Jalen Brunson said. “They were great, made the plays we didn’t.”
Across the final six minutes it was the Pacers who got second and third looks at the basket. They were the ones who twice made remarkable defensive plays when the Knicks had fast-break looks. There will be a few folks back home who’ll say they were the ones who got the benefit of some key 50-50 calls late, which is either the law of basketball averages working itself out or some kind of flag-planting for small markets everywhere.
They out-Knicksed the Knicks, is what they did.
And the Knicks knew it.
“A few plays could’ve gone either way didn’t go our way,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “They beat us to the ball. We did a lot of good things. But we have to be better.”
Brunson was, at best, slowed by his sore foot, though he refused to blame it for his 10-of-26 shooting night (plus three missed foul shots), for a string of misses during the hairiest moments of the fourth quarter that almost look like blooper film when they miss because he makes them so often.
Donte DiVincenzo (35 points, 7-for-11 from deep) tried to make up the difference. So did Josh Hart (10 points, 18 rebounds, in 43 minutes) and so — remarkably — did Alec Burks, retrieved from witness protection to score 14 points in 21 minutes and help alleviate the absence of OG Anunoby.
And though Brunson wasn’t quite himself, he did bury the 3 with 42.1 seconds left that knotted the game at 106, that quieted Gainbridge Fieldhouse to a whisper. And that set up an against-the-screenplay finish that sent Pacers fans out into the night dizzy with glee.
“If I’m in there, if I’m playing, then there are no excuses. If I can walk, I can play,” said Brunson, who admitted he may have given in to the temptation of hero ball right after Nembhard’s prayer was answered, heaving up an off-balance 27-footer that never had a chance.
“Terrible decision on my part,” he said.
Terrible decision, wonderful theater. By the end, it was a wonder any of them could still stand, let alone make big plays, and the Knicks were one right cross away from knocking the Pacers to the moon. Never happened. This time Alice made Ralph sleep on the couch.
