Doesn’t this sound like the tagline of a weird 1980s Footloose-type film? “The Knicks are against Jazz, but some plucky teenagers manage to change the town’s mind with an impromptu performance!”
Anyhow, this game is huge for a number of reasons…
1. It is important to see how they respond from their crushing loss on Monday night, where they blew a 567 point lead in the fourth quarter.
2. This is the end of one of their seemingly inordinate home stands and you have to figure that they will stop playing so many home games, so they have to bank these wins now
3. The Jazz were struggling before their star player, Rudy Gobert, was injured. Without him, they’re a mockery of a sham. They couldn’t score with him on the team, but at least their defense was legendary (speaking of legendary defense, the Boston Celtics are holding teams to a shockingly low amount of points. It’s absurd how few points teams are scoring on the Celtics). Now, they are just flat out bad. The Knicks have no excuse not to beat them at home.
4. Donovan Mitchell has the special NBA green light that players are given when they are not just go to scorers, but their teams beg them to just shoot as much as possible, so if he has a good game, that will be annoying to hear (the DSJ stuff is bad enough).
So….yeah, the Knicks really need to win this one.
Let’s go, Knicks!