Carmelo Anthony took the inbound pass from Ron Baker with 6.3 seconds remaining. With the Knicks down two, Anthony was thinking win.
So he came around a screen by Baker, arose from 25 feet on the right side and fired over the Suns’ T.J. Warren.
“I was thinking the ball was in,” Anthony said.
So did everybody else in the joint. The 3-point shot was in … then out after rolling around the rim.
“It did everything it was supposed to do but stay down,” Courtney Lee said. “It went in twirled around and it bounced out.”
And so the Knicks suffered yet another gut-punch loss, their 10th defeat of the season by five points or fewer and their fifth by two or fewer. The Suns completed a two-game season-series sweep with a 107-105 victory at the Garden on a night when the Knicks’ defense was a no-show for more than half the game.
“It’s frustrating because we’re not winning many [close games],” Knicks coach Jeff Hornacek said. “We won some games earlier in the season that were that way. We’ve lost a bunch in a row now that are that way.
“It’s just a bad stretch we’re in now.”
So the laurels as the game’s hero went not to Anthony, on his 31-point night, but to Suns 26-point scorer Devin Booker, whose 3-pointer with 31.7 seconds left proved to be the winning shot.
Booker, who scored nine of his points in the fourth quarter, was wide open on the right top of the arc. Derrick Rose, who was criticized for a weak close-out against Atlanta’s Dennis Schroder on a critical 3-pointer Monday, scurried from the foul line against Booker, but was late arriving.
“It was an excellent pass by [Eric] Bledsoe,” Booker said of the assist from his backcourt mate, who finished with 23 points and seven assists. “I am always shot ready.”
Not so the Knicks’ defense.
“I was telling KP [Kristaps Porzingis] to pull over, to go up on the screen with Bledsoe and I thought I contested the ball pretty good, not thinking that he had hit the last three previous shots,” said Rose, who scored 26 points, including the last two by the Knicks, 2:05 from the end. “I probably should have hugged him a little bit.”
The way Booker was shooting, Rose should have been reading the “machine wash, tumble dry” label on his jersey.
Rose apparently was upset over a non-call, but he refused to openly gripe. He drove with 28.5 seconds remaining and the Knicks down two, drew contact from behind, but heard no whistle. Neither did Hornacek.
“He’s going at such a fast speed, guys come over and challenge it, hit him with the body. Then there’s no call,” Hornacek said. “But we’ll have him just continue to drive it in there, try to finish on those plays.”
They also might want to start defending a little earlier. The Knicks gave up just 17 points in the fourth quarter (of course they scored just 15 in the frame), but they were swamped for 61 points in the first half.
“We can do a better job coming out, more focused in the first half,” said Porzingis, who started again as the Knicks went back to their usual starting five for the first time in six games, and scored 14 points. “Then we can see what we need we can turn it up and we can get stops defensively and play better basketball. It’s tough to have that fourth-quarter intensity throughout the whole game, but we can do a better job starting out.”
No argument from Hornacek who received a 15-rebound effort from Joakim Noah, back starting at center after missing two games with an ankle sprain. Noah’s boardwork (he finished with zero points) helped temper Tyson Chandler’s 16 rebounds.
“You’ve got to do it more than that one quarter. If we can have that the first three quarters, getting after it — it’s not easy,” Hornacek said. “It’s not easy to put that effort on both sides of the court, but we’re going to have to be able to win these games.”
Hey, when you keep losing close games, trying anything, even something as radical as defending, is not a bad idea.