MIAMI — These are the kinds of statistics that don’t mean anything until they mean everything. If you’re talking about something that stretches back to 1959, you’re talking about something that happened when Tom Thibodeau was 1, you’re talking about something that happened two years before Leon Rose was born, something that happened a few decades before any of the Knicks’ players was born.
All true. All fair.
Still, you can debate unwelcome history all you want. Manny Ramirez and Pedro Martinez always insisted they shouldn’t have to answer for 86 years of Red Sox frustration. Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant always believed they didn’t have to take hits in 2016 for the fact the Cubs had last won a title in 1908. And all of them did the best thing you can do about it.
They took a billy club to it.
So it’s on Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle and Josh Hart and the rest to do the same to some troubling Knicks history that they can either join or officially blast to smithereens across the next week or so.
On March 13, 1959, the Syracuse Nats walked into the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue and 25th Street and laid a 129-123 beating on the Knicks. Dolph Schayes dropped 35 points for the visitors, Richie Guerin 22 for the Knicks. There was a standing-room only crowd of 5,160 on hand to watch the Knicks play their first playoff home game in four years. Two days later the Nets closed the Knicks out upstate, at the Onondaga War Memorial, 131-115, sweeping the best-of-three.
It was the first time the Knicks lost Game 1 of a playoff series at home.
They’ve done so seven times since, most recently last Sunday to the Heat.
They are 0-7 in such series. Pending this one, of course.
Thibodeau is not likely to use this as part of his pregame talk Saturday afternoon, when the Knicks and the Heat renew hostilities at Kaseya Center, knotted at 1-1 in these best-of-seven Eastern Conference semifinals. It’s entirely likely that Thibodeau doesn’t even know about this (at least until he reads the national edition of The Post Saturday morning with his coffee and pancakes).
Follow The Post’s coverage of the Knicks vs. Heat NBA playoff series
- Vaccaro: Knicks’ failure to help Brunson is why their season’s over
- Knicks battle but fall in season-ending Game 6 loss to Heat
- Knicks couldn’t survive two minutes without Brunson
- Brunson’s heroic night spoiled by late turnover
Still. Facts are facts.
History is history.
It doesn’t mean anything until it means everything.
“It’s the next challenge,” Thibodeau said earlier this week, talking about Game 3 specifically, but also about needing to steal a game back in what promises to be a brutal and hostile environment in Game 3, Game 4 and (possibly) Game 6. “So just be ready. Each game, that’s the nature of the playoffs. The intensity goes up each game, so be ready.”
The 1959 series and the 1981 Knicks-Bulls series are the two on the list that don’t feel similar, since both were best-of-three miniseries. But the other five all have some eerie similarities in them. We’ll start with this: after losing Game 1, the Knicks then won the next time they played at home every time (in ’69, against the Celtics in Bill Russell’s last hurrah, it was Game 3 since they alternated home-court every game).
And we’ll end with this:
Only once — against the Paces in 1995 — did the Knicks even drag the series out to seven games. That’s the difficulty of surrendering home court so early in a series: you’re forever chasing, forever playing catch-up. It takes a toll. And it can throw an awful lot of bad mojo at the end of what had been a hopeful season.
In ’69 — a year that was awfully similar to this one, the Knicks making a surprising push after a mid-season pickup (Dave DeBusschere then, Hart now) — the Knicks simply never found a way to win at Boston Garden despite the fact they’d finished six games better than the Celtics, and had beaten Boston twice on the road in the regular season.
The same thing happened in 1989, when Michael Jordan and the Bulls provided a harbinger of the next decade or so to come by swiping Game 1 at the Garden and never letting the Knicks return the favor at Chicago Stadium. And the same thing happened in 2013 when Paul George and the Pacers filched Game 1 in New York and then went 3-0 back home. The Hawks did even better two years ago, winning Game 1 to lead off the series and Game 5 to close it out.
Only in 1995 did the Knicks answer back — winning Game 6 at old Market Square Arena for the second straight year — before dropping Game 7 because of The Finger Roll.
And now, this. Now, the Knicks, the fifth-best road team in the league all year, have to figure out a way to beat Miami in Miami, a place where they went 1-1 this season, the one win maybe the most dramatic of them all, Julius Randle’s 3 winning it with 1.1 seconds left back on March 3. The Knicks will take one like that, or a blowout, or a shootout, or a rock fight.
Not picky this time of year, this point of the series. They just need to find one.
