The Knicks Have Totally Stopped Making Sense

Blowout win over the Magic lifts Knicks back to winning record

If you feel confident about what the Knicks season is going to bring next, you should shuffle yourself to the closest purveyor of Mega Million tickets and get yourself paid.

We're looking for hands on that front and we don't see any. That's a good thing, because there simply can't be anyone who knows what's coming down the pike with this team.

After Wednesday night's 108-86 massacre of the Magic, we have reached the point in this complete madhouse of a season where we would believe just about anything.

Mike Woodson paints ribald inspirational messages on his bald dome to motivate the team? Landry Fields can't make wide open shots because he traded his own ability to the devil in exchange for a winning record?

All of it seems totally plausible after watching the Knicks on Wednesday night. Thanks to all the injuries, it was a game that was easy to write off as a loss to a good team going into the Garden but it turned into a woodshed beating of said good team that left everyone totally speechless.

It started with Carmelo Anthony, who took the team on his back for the second straight game and led them all the way to the victory. He did it thanks to a shift in offensive philosophy away from the pick and roll that Baron Davis can't run to an inside-out game that probably looked familiar to Magic assistant Patrick Ewing, who got a well-deserved and lengthy standing ovation in a return to the building he once called home.

Anthony isn't much like Ewing, but he played the same role in the first half by either driving through/around/over defenders for points or kicking the ball out to an open teammate on the perimeter. Said teammate would either knock down a shot or move the ball for an even more open teammate who would knock down their shot.

Then, in the third quarter, Melo went nuts from the outside with a pair of threes and a string of other jumpers that turned a comfortable Knicks lead into a total laugher. Anthony's touch was contagious to the point where it felt like a physical impossibility that the Knicks would ever miss a shot.

There was a 21-0 run that left the Knicks up by 39 points at one point in the third and expectations grew so high for the shooting that the crowd was legitimately stunned when a fan trying a half-court shot to win a car didn't knock it down. Anthony was the impetus for all of it, putting aside his groin injuries and season-long shooting slump in one of the best performances he's authored since wearing a Knicks jersey.

It wasn't all Melo, of course. Iman Shumpert had the kind of game that makes people go overboard with predictions of future success, dropping 25 points and playing his usually fine defense at the other end. 

Reincarnated or not, Novak had one of those nights where he couldn't miss and J.R. Smith continued to put lie to the notion that he's nothing but a conscious-less gunner who cares not for anything but his own stat line. He's a conscious-less gunner, but he also plays hard on defense and gives this team help on the boards in ways no one was expecting.

And then there's Tyson Chandler, who rendered Dwight Howard as useless as a butterfly on defense and the boards. It doesn't hurt that Howard plays with the same intensity level as a child watching the aforementioned butterfly, but Chandler just destroyed him and helped pave the way to the humiliation machine that the Knicks drove all over the Magic.

Put it all together and you've got the giddiest, greatest win of a year that keeps finding new ways to shock all of us. We'd say it can't get any better than this, but we know you wouldn't believe it.

Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.

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