The ending is what will eat away at these Knicks for a few days, before they face the Wizards in Washington on Friday. The end was a beautiful trip by RJ Barrett that went awry, with smart old Jimmy Butler staying with Barrett just long enough to force him to go higher than he wanted to.
The ball spun away. The final bell rang at the AmericanAirlines Arena. There would be no overtime. There would be no return for Sunday’s game between the two teams. There would be no satisfactory flight home from Miami. The final score was 98-96, Heat, the final verdict that the Knicks, although better, are still learning to win, and part if that curve involves learning how not to lose.
“We need everyone to play well,” said Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau. “And we just fell short in the end.”
But if you invested in this Knicks team, you saw something that made you feel great. By now, you have certainly learned to trust Thibodeau, to trust your instincts, to recognize that he knows the little nuances that allow teams willing to improve.
So it should be obvious that Thibodeau was not interested in a happy meeting when it became clear that Derrick Rose was not simply available, but interested in a second tour with the Knicks and a third tour under Thibodeau’s tutelage. Thibodeau made it clear that it is about one thing and only one thing.
And there is a right way to make that ambition real.
“I was always partial,” he said earlier in the day, “towards good players.”
And Rose, even at 32, even after the twists and turns of an sometimes unhappy career, is still a good player. As if to reinforce this – and also to quell any fears that Knicks fans may have harbored that he would steal Immanuel Quickley’s playing time – the two checked in together at the same time on Tuesday night, No. 4 and No. 5 taking the floor with 3:27 remaining in the first quarter and the Knicks below seven.
And over the next six minutes, spanning two quarters, the Knicks had a 25-6 run. Quickley was fine. But it was Rose who raised her eyebrows: to reach the basket with the old talent, to shoot well, to strike, to encourage companions. It was impossible to take your eyes off him.
He would finish with 14 points and three assists, playing just 20 minutes. Since the Knicks were trying to steal one from the Heat at the end of the quarter, he was on the bench, Thibodeau didn’t want to ask for much of his first day at work. But you can feel the impact right away.
Quickley, in the morning, had talked about Rose looking for him and Obi Toppin at dinner Monday night, giving them his cell phone number, almost demanding that they take his brain. Quickley laughed at his shared legacy as survivors of John Calipari’s apprenticeship at the college of hard love, and laughed that Thibodeau was the coach of the two in his NBA debut years.
“I can learn a lot from him,” said Quickley.
“He’s always trying to win,” said Barrett. “It’s great to have such a guy on our team.”
As for Rose himself? He seemed completely moved to get another chance in New York and to resume his partnership with Thibodeau, a couple who really could have delivered something special in Chicago a decade ago, had bad luck not intervened.
“We have a synergy, I can’t explain it,” said Rose. “We are a strange couple, but for some reason we understand the game in the same way, we are students of the game, we watch the game and try to understand it better.”
Not only does he understand that part of his role with the Knicks will be to help children get used to life in the NBA, he also enthusiastically endorsed it.
“My job,” he said, “is to arrive and understand that I want to be a mentor for children, to help them develop. And also show that I can still move a little bit “,
He showed a little bit of everything that Tuesday, a game that the Knicks lost, because they are still learning not to lose games like this. These lessons can be more easily understood going forward. There is a new mentor in the house. And he can still move a little.