There’s quiet. There’s silence. And then there’s what filled the entirety of the fifth floor of 4 Pennsylvania Plaza just after 10:15 Tuesday night. Call it funereal. Call it doleful, or dismal, or dreary. Call it maudlin, morose, morbid. Call it bleak. Call it joyless. Call it gloomy.
Call it all the angst of 53 empty basketball seasons coming together and colliding as James Harden danced down the lane and drew a foul from Karl-Anthony Towns. There were 7 minutes and 52 seconds left in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, and Madison Square Garden had lost the will to boo. That’s how bad it was.
“We had played so well for so long,” Kenny Atkinson said.
Atkinson, tough gym rat out of Northport and St. Anthony’s, had seen his team shake off fatigue and weary legs. When Harden made the first free throw, it gave the Cavaliers a 93-71 lead. In all the places where logarithms and algorithms churn and whirl and figure such matters, a curious thing happened in that moment: The Cavaliers were given a 99.9 percent chance to win the game.
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