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The thing that will haunt the Knicks all summer long, barring some kind of profound turnaround, will not be the Heat’s 3-point shooting, even if there are stretches of these games when it seems they won’t ever miss again.
It won’t even be Jimmy Butler and Bam Adebayo, as good as they are, as good as they were, as well as they’ve played, the two of them combining for 50 points Monday, with Butler adding 10 assists and Adebayo 13 rebounds, powering the Heat to the brink of the Eastern Conference finals with this 108-101 victory.
No. This is what will irk them, preoccupy them, keep them up at night in July and August and all the way to training camp, thinking back at this series:
They have been outworked.
They have been outhustled.
They have played the regular stooge to Miami’s smarter, savvier, crisper approach.
All of those things were on display Monday night at Kaseya Center, and all of those things were what prevented the Knicks from making anything resembling a legitimate run at the Heat, who surrendered the lead for exactly 24 seconds.
“Maybe they want it more,” Julius Randle said. “I don’t know.”
If that’s true — and, more to the point, if that’s what the Knicks really believe — then it’s probably going to be a waste of everybody’s time to even bother to show up at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night, when the Knicks will play for their season, when they will try to take the first of what now seems an impossible and impassable three-step journey past Miami.
RJ Barrett sounded a bit more optimistic: “We’ve got to get back to being the tough, physical team that we’ve been, take care of the defense boards and take care of the ball better.
