MIAMI — By rights, and by reason, this should all be a pro forma gathering at Kaseya Center on Friday night. By rights, and by reason, and by what we’ve all seen in this series so far, the Heat ought to take care of their business in Game 6, send the Knicks back home without a basketball game to prepare for Monday.
The Heat have been the better team across these first five games and they have been damn near untouchable at home, trailing for exactly 24 seconds in two games. They have shot the ball exquisitely, outworked the Knicks at both ends of the floor. The Knicks never once made the Heat sweat out those wins the way the Heat pushed the Knicks to the fourth quarter in Games 2 and 5.
By rights, and by reason, the Knicks should be forced to lock the balls away for a few months by sometime after 10 o’clock Friday night.
There is one thing, though.
There is this stubborn, underlying belief the Knicks have — and which they’ve shown, continually, this season — that they are never more dangerous than when it feels they are close to careening into the murkiest parts of the ocean. All season, faced with benchmark games that could have sent them spiraling down the standings the Knicks always had an answer. They always found a way.
They sure found a way Wednesday night, when they trailed 24-14 after a quarter, when the Garden was flagrantly funereal, when it sure seemed the Heat were going to run the Knicks right out of their own gym.
Instead, there was an 18-2 run to kick off the second quarter, which seemed to come clear out of nowhere. There was a stout fourth-quarter stand where the Heat erased all but two points of a 19-point deficit, the exact kind of games in which the Heat positively tortured the Bucks in the first round.
And so there is another day for this team. There is an another chance. There is at least one more game, Game 6, with a chance to force Game 7 and make the Heat join them in throwing all their cards on the table back at the Garden on Monday night.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the Knicks vs. Heat NBA playoff series
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- 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
All year long they have defied — and exceeded — expectations. All year long they have heard the whispers of doom and answered them bluntly: Doubt us at your own risk.
Now they face the firing squad of skeptics again.
Now, they collide with a second straight elimination game, in a hostile building in which they’ve looked strictly overmatched so far this series, knowing they need to play an almost perfect game — no silly turnovers, no sloppy slippages on the boards, no daring the Heat to take wide-open 3s because as we’ve seen by now they’ll happily take them — and merrily make them.
Forty-eight minutes to prove the same point they’ve proven time and again these past six months. At a singular moment of truth for this group.
“Maximum effort,” Mitch Robinson said, asked what it’ll take for the Knicks to get back on the airplane Friday night with their season still intact. “Rebounding is mainly what this game comes down to. Whoever wins the rebounding matchup is nine out of 10 times who wins the game.”
You start there. You move on to defense, to keeping the endless array of shooters from having one of those games where it feels they’re making 90 percent of their shots, regardless of what the official stats say. And lastly you land on sweat equity, which is what the Knicks have specialized in, especially at those seminal moments of the season when they needed to stand up and declare themselves.
Of course, the Heat will be relying on the same things. And so far, in Miami anyway, have been superior in each way, in every facet.
“We feel like we had a shot to close this out tonight,” Miami’s Kyle Lowry said Wednesday night. “We have to go home and do our job and protect home court.”
If they do, we’ll see the Knicks again next come October. If the Knicks can figure a way to right themselves one more time when the blur is most dark, we’ll have more basketball in New York City on Monday night. Maybe that feels like a long shot right now, and maybe it is.
These Knicks have never seemed to mind that. They actually seem to prefer it. We’ll see if they can summon that defiance one more time.
