NEW YORK -- Two and a half weeks ago, the Knicks and Nets clashed in Madison Square Garden. It was a meeting between the 10th and 11th best teams in the East, two floundering franchises seemingly destined for failure. The Knicks had lost of 11 of 13 games when Jeremy Lin, a twice-released point guard out of Harvard, unassumingly checked into the action.
The rest is history. Lin scored 25 points in that Feb. 4 game to spark a 99-92 victory over New Jersey. He averaged 25 points and 9.5 assists over his next eight starts, improbably lifting the Knicks to .500. His story captivated the world -- a refreshingly genuine nobody-believed-in-me tale that dominated headlines from Brooklyn to Beijing.
On Monday, however, that script was flipped. Despite Lin's best efforts (21 points, nine assists, seven rebounds), the Nets upset the surging Knicks at home, 100-92. And with it, New York's roller coaster of a home stand (beat Sacramento, lost to New Orleans, beat Dallas, lost to New Jersey) took another surprising twist.
"The whole team was out of sync," said Knicks coach Mike D'Antoni. "We lost what we were doing the last eight or nine games."
That much was clear, with the Knicks displaying a carelessness that was absent against the defending champ Mavericks. It prompts the inevitable question: Will the newfound allegiance between Lin and Carmelo Anthony -- who scored just 11 points in his first game back since suffering a strained groin on Feb. 6 -- develop into the perfect union that New York so fiercely hopes?
"Any time you have new players coming back, your identity as a team is going to change," said Lin. "That's what we need to figure out, what our identity is gonna be."
At times, the nightmares concocted by talking heads -- issues with spacing; a lack of offensive concentration -- were realized. After racing to a 13-3 lead to open the game, the Knicks were outscored 39-20 over the next 14:41, shooting a paltry 8 of 24 during that span. Anthony was particularly sloppy, finishing with a game-high six turnovers, three more than the error-prone Lin.
The most representative play occurred with 6:47 left in the third quarter. Anthony tried to juke DeShawn Stevenson, attempting a stop-and-go toward the basket. The ball slipped out of his hands and sailed harmlessly out of bounds. Whether it was a result of a lay-off or him pressing, he, and the Knicks, appeared discernibly flat.
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