Knicks 114, 76ers 113: ‘This is the closest I'll feel to a playoff game as a Knicks fan’

The last few sequences of Wednesday night's season finale were surreal. Fucking surreal.

A bunch of dudes just making shots interspersed with images of Leslie Jones jumping up and down, cheering. People were cheering. Yelling "deeee-fense," hoping the Knicks would get a stop.

It was so confusing.

You get so used to rooting for one team—the one that is your favourite, usually—that rooting against them feels completely unnatural. As a Knicks fan this isn’t anything new, but tonight’s just felt so weird.

When Holiday got that bucket, I naturally twitched out of excitement before thinking: “noooooooo.” When Stauskas hit that shot on the ensuing Philly possession, my reflex was to have the opposite reaction before realizing: “YES!”

My brain couldn’t handle it. The last minute of the game was insanely exciting. My team ended up winning, and instead of feeling the elation I normally would, I was pissed off. I think P&Ter Anthony FreeMasons said it best, this shit did feel like a playoff game. One that ended in a Knick win that I wasn’t able to cheer about.

Fuck.

Like, why couldn’t they just call off the dogs after the Stauskas three? Why couldn’t they just pack it up, go home and start letting us fans watch highlights of Malik Monk? Why.

I would also like to offer my condolences to NeedforShved, who had “Miles Bridges 2017” as his signature for a long time, and I could only imagine took a lot of flak for it. Oh well would you look at that, he already changed it to “Miles Bridges 2018.” He already knows the Knicks will be back in the lottery, not even giving them a chance.

You guys are the best <3.

Notes!

• Carmelo Anthony: Lots of the conversation tonight surrounded whether or not Melo was playing his last game as a Knick. I don’t know, nobody knows. I don’t even think he does at this point.

If this was it, though, I would like to publicly thank him for coming the Knicks and putting up with a lot of crap. The franchise may have been better off without him—we’ll never know for sure—but there are strong arguments in favour of that point of view.

I don’t care, honestly. He brought a lot of excitement to the Knicks and he handled some of the more obnoxious fans—the glazed donut face asses, if you will—and the shitty organization with the utmost professionalism, imo. Most importantly, though, he brought “glazed donut face ass” into our vocabulary, and for that, we are forever indebted.

Now, I’ll try my best to be a journalist and analyze his game with as much objectivity as possible...ahem, he sucked. The one thing we didn’t want him to do was get buckets, and that’s the only thing he did. 17 points on 7-15 from the field, 0-1 from deep. He did just about nothing else. Yeah, Melo sucked tonight.

• Maurice Ndour: He played an awful game and made the one shot that sunk the tank. He was playing tanktabulously until he made the shot. We’ll never forgive you.

Do y’all even care about his stat line at this point?

• The Bench: I’m gonna skip to the bench because it was so damn good and I hate them for it.

- Mindaugas Kuzminskas scored 11 points and grabbed 4 rebounds.

- Marshall Plumlee bazooka’d the tank with a 14-point, 11-board double-double.

- Chasson Randle had 12 points but also turned it over 4 times...we see you, Chasson.

- Sasha Vujacic, of course, looked pretty useful tonight with a 7-point, 6-assist performance. Man, I hope they got rid of him as soon as they got to the damn locker room.

- Justin Holiday, ugh. I can’t even be mad at him. I am, but I’m having a hard time.

My dude has been in the league since 2012 and has never been able to settle on one team. He’s playing for a stable contract. As much as I hope it’s in New York, I just want to see this dude play on a winning team because I love him. He scored 20 points and had 5 rebounds in 20 minutes off the bench. I hope someone does themselves a huge favour and pays this man.

***

It’s over!

A season that started off so well and turned to absolute poop in the blink of an eye is finally done. The episodes of this crazy soap opera included Phil being ever-so-subtly racist, reaching 4 games over .500 before crashing, Noah, Rose dipping for Chicago, not Ricky Rubio, Oakley, Kyle O’Quinn punching Plumlee in the face and Courtney Lee’s Instagram.

Honestly, just go draft a fucking point guard.