Well, that was something.
What it was, was a slaughter. A spanking. A smackdown. It was a thrashing and a threshing. It was a beating and a battering, a bloodying and a bludgeoning. It was eye-opening, for sure, and stomach-turning if your loyalties lay with the team wearing white uniforms instead of the ones wearing green.
What it was, was Celtics 132, Knicks 109, at Boston’s TD Garden, and it easily could have been much, much worse if the Knicks hadn’t waved a white flag that the Celtics accepted, but only after poking the Knicks in the eye a few more times. This looked like a buy game in college, the Knicks taking 500 large to get their heads handed to them on Homecoming Day.
The Celtics raised a banner, then laid down a hammer.
“Defensively we have to be a lot better than we were,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said when the carnage was complete. “There was some indecision. When you play a team like that you have to scramble. One effort’s not enough, you have to be second and third and fourth effort. And even then they still have the ability to make.”
They do. At one remarkable point of the second half, the Knicks were shooting 59.1 percent from the field, the C’s 58; the Celtics led 99-70.
No, this wasn’t the way Thibs hoped this would go. This certainly wasn’t what Leon Rose envisioned when he crafted the roster with the express purpose of matching up better with the Celtics. As opening nights go, this was “Moose Murders,” and if you aren’t an expert on Broadway trivia, you can either trust me or Google it. This was that bad.
And also conjured the famous final scene of “The Candidate,” Robert Redford’s Senator-elect Bill McKay pulling Peter Boyle’s Marvin Lucas into a hotel room and asking: “What do we do now?”
Well, if nothing else, Thibodeau was able to collect more teaching moments across these 48 minutes than he did in all of the preseason. Look: the Celtics are the NBA gold standard right now. They are the defending champions, and as whole and intact as a champion has been since at least the 2004-05 Pistons, even without Kristaps Porzingis.
The Knicks? By comparison, they’re still getting to know each other. They are still in the bonding phase and Tuesday night’s study in team building was how, together, they watched 29 of the Celtics’ first 48 3-pointers splash through. Some of them were open. Most were contested. And with each one you could see the light dim in the Knicks’ eyes.
(It was almost hilarious that the moment the Celtics tied the NBA record with that 29th 3 — with just under nine minutes still to play – they missed their final 13 shots of the game, and with the crowd pleading for one more shot at the record on their final possession Boston coach Joe Mazzulla ordered them to take a knee instead. As I said: ALMOST hilarious.)
“The NBA needs to drug test these guys,” Josh Hart said, managing a joke after it was over because what else can you say? “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
So here’s where you start: you look for the thin reeds of positivity that grew up through the mud and the slop. Deuce McBride, for instance, scored 22 off the bench on 8-for-10, just the way we remember him from the best nights of last spring. Karl-Anthony Towns, limited to just 24 minutes after the game got out of hand, showed why he will be a fun watch all year.
Maybe most essentially there was Mikal Bridges’ second half. Bridges had been brutal across the board in the first half, missing all five of his shots, looking like a putter with a bad case of the yips whenever he cocked his arm to shoot. But in the second, he was 7-for-8, and 2-for-3 from 3. The game was already decided, but that did come against the Celtics starters. It was something.
It’s a long season, yes. It’s a long time from now to the critical hours of April, May and June, sure. It only counts for one loss, exactly the same as a four-overtime gut punch would have: indisputable.
But also a little worrisome. How could it not be? The Knicks believed that at the least, they’d made inroads on closing the gap with the Celtics. And they still might. But for now, after one game, a game in which they wanted to see where they measured up with the Celtics, the result was a painful diagnosis everywhere: head, heart, eyes, ears, esophagus.
It was a long night. Luckily for the Knicks, it is also a long season.