These have been an unfamiliar few days for the Knicks. These have been days plush with plaudits, rife with respect, overdosing on overpraise. Remember the start of “Goodfellas,” when young Henry Hill talks about how differently the neighborhood kids treated him after they learned he was hooked up with Paulie’s crew?
“One day? One day, some of the kids from the neighborhood carried my mother’s groceries all the way home. You know why? It was outta respect.”
In essence, the Knicks spent the past few days blowing up cars all over Atlanta. And suddenly, there are a lot of people looking at the Knicks a lot differently than they did from October until April. Suddenly, the Knicks aren’t the frustrating bunch who would occasionally present themselves as only semi-interested in the regular season.
Suddenly, they are no longer a team that other teams go out of their way to finagle their seeding to play them. The Hawks swear they didn’t do that. But their behavior on the final weekend of the regular season sure presents as a textbook case study of a team that wanted to do everything in its power to avoid the — goodness — Cleveland Cavaliers and engineer a matchup with the Knicks.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
