Nuggets 117, Knicks 94: "This is all kinds of bad."

I'm thinking about knees. Joints in general. Why do we-- humans, vertebrates-- need all these joints? What if we were giant, fleshy worms with faces, just squiggling from place to place? Maybe we'd have wormy limbs and fingers for typing our blogs, but the joints would just have gooey musculature and definitely no skeletal business whatsoever. Why wouldn't that work? I'm just saying. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if the Knicks were a just a tangle of slimy annelids squirming about the court in their tubular uniforms.

But no, each of the Knicks has a pair of knees, and I'm really resenting that right now. Amar'e Stoudemire is done for months because of his knees. Tyson Chandler did something to his left knee-- contused it, perhaps-- and got carried off the floor late in the second quarter. Carmelo Anthony played 22 dismal minutes in his return to Denver tonight before retreated wordlessly to the locker room because his balky right knee had stiffened up again. Knees are the worst, man.

It obviously wasn't just about the knees tonight. The knees only compounded the horror. The Knicks played without energy and without a plan in a match-up that demanded a lot of the former and at least some semblance of the latter. Their 117-94 loss in Denver embodied the gravest of our pre-game fears-- those Nuggets flitted to and fro through the thin Rocky air while their fans jeered the wheezing Knicks in glee. New York stayed afloat during the first quarter, but collapsed in an irretrievable heap during Denver's 21-1 second-quarter run. That yellow blur of dunks pretty much ended the game, and that was before Melo and Chandler left the floor.

Tonight was, like Bronx Chica commented, all kinds of bad. Every kind of bad. If there was any good, it was the sharp performance of Iman Shumpert, who scored 20 points on 10 shots (4-5 from downtown) and did well to remind us that the tyranny of knees can be defeated. Of course, this probably ends with the Nuggets taking him from us somehow.

The Knicks are quite bad and quite hurt at the moment. There's still time for a change in the first thing. I'll update on the second thing as soon as I see more news. For now, I encourage you to take a long look at this turtle baby attacking a raspberry. Take a long, long look and forget your troubles.