In a just world, Tim Hardaway Jr. makes that three-pointer from the corner, and the Detroit Pistons beat the New York Knicks, 96-94. Not, “In a just world, David Guthrie calls that foul,” even though he performed that rarest of mea culpae: the official’s admission of doctrinal error. This may seem like a needle’s-eye distinction, but we’re not here to indulge a rant about bad officiating. If that’s you, you deserve to drink alone, outside. In a hailstorm. In Scotland.
But we’re also willing to say that in a just world, Cade Cunningham makes that 14-footer seven seconds earlier, and the Pistons beat the Knicks, 95-94. Not because we care about the Pistons, or for that matter the Knicks. In a good and entertaining series, the team that is behind should always tie the series up to increase the chances of Game 7 Christmas, and Knicks-Pistons is indeed that. That New York survived Sunday, 94-93, and took a 3-1 lead over Detroit is not good, not good at all, because it could make Game 5 on Tuesday the clincher, and there has never been a seven-game series that ends in five that has been worth a damn or remembered as anything special.
Game 4 was a wonderfully taut affair, played like your standard dockside bar fight because both the Knicks and Pistons not only have traditions but contemporary style choices to uphold. There have been a number of points in the series where you could watch a play and wonder how a team preferred to end a possession, with an off-balance clock-beating three-pointer or a flagrant foul off the ball. Knicks-Pistons as a series is 1988, and in 1988 a playoff game in which one teams scores 100 is weak sauce.
This game was not, particularly down the stretch when Karl-Anthony Towns and Hardaway were trading degree-of-difficulty threes that took a tight game and ratcheted it up to confessing-to-murders-you-didn’t-commit intensity. The final bucket, Towns’s step-back 27-footer with 47 seconds left, deserved to be a game-winner in any game, in any round. But it was still the wrong result because, as ABC’s auctioneer Dave Pasch liked to remind us, teams taking a 3-1 lead eventually win the series 95 percent of the time and win Game 5 60 percent of the time. This riveting paint-scraper could be done by Tuesday, and that’s no way to reward the audience. (This is not true in all situations, of course. Thunder-Grizzlies could not end quickly enough, and Cavs-Heat has been little better, with an average final score of 122-100.)
When given a series as throwbacky as Knicks-Pistons, seven games isn’t too much to ask. The call/no-call becomes a vital if annoying element of every close game, and the debate about whether Guthrie should have called Knicks wing Josh Hart for body-bumping Hardaway is already tedious. Guthrie copped to missing the foul, which is a refreshing way of tackling difficult late-game calls that the two-minute report fails miserably to address, but playoff games have been far more tolerant of plays like Hart’s since the Pistons played in Fort Wayne. Cunningham’s open look was the issue, because everything after that was the cafeteria scene from Blazing Saddles. The just world and the real world are two different things, as anyone who votes regularly can attest, and today no one is taking that lesson to heart more than the Pistons. David Guthrie may have taken the knee, but Detroit’s fate didn’t need to get to him at all.
