The knights found what they were capable of forgetting at night

Marv Albert had the perfect word for this.

He would call it “gar-deaf”.

Typically, this was simply a reference to the final part of a blowout, when the professional counterparts of the walk-on were called to the scorer’s table, when they were trying to spend their rare and valuable minutes, as they He could shoot as many shots. , Barely breathing on top of each other, guarding each other.

It was terrible on the ears and bad on the eyes, which would still keep the dial on radio stations and TV networks, and Marv would give it a French twist, turning to Calle Ramsey or Butch Beard or John Andrissay or Clyde. Frazier.

“Gar-deaf time,” he would say.

Yes. It was garbage. It was a game devised from too many nights in the last 20 years, when the effort was lacking, the defense was a rumor, the execution laughable. The difference was, too many previous coaches who would absorb this 119–93 loss to the Spurs based on their permanent record – David Fizdale, Jeff Hornacek, Derek Fisher, Don Chaney, name one – would sit quietly and helplessly on the bench around them. Trash spread.

Tom Thibodo, he does not sit quietly on benches.

This coach does not passively allow blowouts like those 140–121 given to silence after sticking a knot on the Kings last week, so he certainly wasn’t going to sit by the fool because the Spurs had buttocks. Hammer on, humiliating them. , They were taken back down to sea level, back to 500 by 18-18 at the official halfway mark of the season.

“You get,” Thibodo stated bluntly, “what do you want.”

A game is not canceled that has come before. If you were the smartest, as the most discriminating Knicks fan, you have a sense of where it was at the beginning of the third quarter, when the Nucks stopped defending someone and the Spurs played Tony Parker, Manu was taken advantage of by seeing smugglers like Ginobili and the like. Tim Duncan back on the roster for one night.

Maybe you get a sense of where it was going in the tenth part of seven seconds. How much time was left in the first half after the officials reversed an earlier call – and did not let the half end with the Spurs to just one point. Somehow the Knots lost track of Patty Mills, who found herself alone in the corner.

Expert shooters like Mills have plenty of time to catch, settle and fire seven-tenths of a second. The mills caught, settled and fired. The one-point game was a four-point game.

The term “Harbinger” was invented for similar moments.

And for whom was the term “gar-BAHGE” invented.

There were also remote controls.

Thibodo, no doubt, is not exactly known for euphemistic speech. Even after the victory he looks like a man in need of a pint glass of Pepto-Bismol, so he was not mimicking his words.

“We didn’t play our best,” Thibodo said, leading with a generous dose of irony, “and when you’re on the road you have to play well for 48 minutes. We didn’t do that.”

But even when he regretted it, he turned the page. Because you have to. Because living on the trash does not make the waste disappear, no matter how you say it.

“It’s a glorious group,” he said. He said, “We are disappointed with the way we played. We will make some improvements. We will be ready to play [Thursday, against the Pistons at the Garden]”

Thibodo is not blind, and he is not naive, and he is not stupid. He knew what he was doing when he was doing this job. He had to know that there were going to be nights like this on schedule; Everything else in the universe expected much more from them.

But Thibodo has cultivated an informal understanding with these players, a professional compact that goes something like this: I believe you are better than the rest of the world, and I will coach you accordingly. But when you are a victim of low expectations then I will also respond appropriately. This is the coach’s confidence charge. This is the cost.

Another New York coach once put it this way: “No medals to try.” This New York coach will certainly subscribe to those four words, and will probably add his own affiliation to it: you will get what you deserve. And some nights that you deserve is a trip to the garbage dump.