A zone defense slowed the Nets' flow toward the end of the first half, and in the second half they continued to look befuddled by the zone. The Knicks were fortunate that the Nets didn't have confident outside shooters to bust the zone outside of Chris Douglas-Roberts (who always seems to have his best games against the Knicks), and didn't  have much of a zone offense generally. Eventually, the Nets did start running cutters into the elbow and used ball reversals a couple of times to isolate CDR on a wing to do this thing, but generally they seemed most effective getting baskets in transition off of Knick misses or turnovers. 

When Hughes started getting to the free throw line and the Knicks cut down on the turnovers, they took control of the game, with the Nets self-destructing toward the end with some unsightly turnovers and possessions. It was the second straight good game for Larry, and in both games he took over at key points. D'Antoni understands that it's a bit of a crapshoot with Hughes in terms of his offense, but the way he dissected the Hawks in the 4th quarter of last Friday's game, and the way he took over the third quarter of this one, was impressively surgical.

The formula for Knick success in their recent streak of good play  -- lights out offense, limiting the damage on defense and on the boards, maintaining some balance between inside and outside offense -- was the same, yet different in this one. Lee, Harrington, and Hughes all had fine games, and the Knicks had 50 points in the paint and attempted only 15 three pointers. What was different were the huge disparities in rebounds and free throws: it's rare to see the Knicks outrebounding teams 48 to 32 and making 28 of 34 free throws.

Most encouraging takeaway from this game: Al passing the ball once he got to the rim. The five assists were four above his season average (the jokes are too obvious here), but anyone who's watched his drives to the hoop knows that his bull-headed focus means no one else sees the ball, making him easy to defend late in games when opposing defenses swarm on him. In this game, perhaps because the mismatch with Josh Boone was so glaring (and maybe recent trade rumors altered Al's perspective a little?), he demonstrated an unprecedented ability to find teammates like David Lee -- one over the shoulder assist had such surprising flair that even Clyde had an outburst on the broadcast: "Where did THAT come from?"  

Needless to say, Al's teammates and all Knick fans would love to see more of passing Al, even if he may never turn out to be the most graceful passer (the majority of his passes late in drives are typically clumsy bail out passes leading to turnovers). Improving his ability to find shooters like Gallo makes him that much more dangerous as an offensive threat, and the Knicks that much harder to defend.

Tonight's game against the Portland Trailblazers produces mixed emotions for me. Of course, I'll be rooting hard for the home team, but Portland has always been one of my favorite teams in the league; Brandon Roy is one of my five favorite players in basketball.  They've had an up and down season so far, battling high expectations and injuries to various players, but seeing Greg Oden go down last Saturday was surely a low point. 

High expectations come with the territory of being a high draft pick, but I've never cared for the fever-pitched scorekeeping and catcalling that comes with the relative success and failure of different players based on draft position, especially when players are still young, and they've worked hard and haven't willfully squandered their opportunities. I don't really care about whether Oden is a "bust", shouldn't have been selected where he was, or whether he's some reincarnation of past perceived failures dating back to Walton post-77. These are provocative storylines that get attention and make for good gossip among casual sports fans, but don't do justice to serious fans who know it takes time to make definitive judgments on the arc of a players' career, and who care first and foremost about a unique talent and (by all accounts) great guy and teammate who's had to battle insane expectations since he was in high school.

Yes, we're talking about a millionaire basketball player who won't exactly struggle with the rest of life, in the middle of very difficult times for a lot of people. But somehow, seeing Greg Oden go down, even seeing highlights and pictures in recaps this morning, chokes me up a surprising amount. Perhaps it was the fragility of his quest toward recovery, toward being significant, toward being a force, that makes this latest setback such a damn shame. The way he wore the stress of his quest on his face (cue the endless old man jokes), the way his personality seemed to veer between a retreat into introversion and confident assertions of his powerful, physical presence. Being a basketball fan, I wanted to see Greg shut people up. And he was on his way there.

I'll forever be thankful for League Pass for the opportunity to see him dominate against the Bulls with a 24 point, 12 rebound performance in November, and to hear the Rose Garden chant his name loudly. I hope we'll hear more cheers in the future after Greg's latest recovery, for the sake of Portland fans and basketball fans in general. And though I'm not the type to wallow in poetic invocations of loss, I like what Sherman Alexie said on Truehoop. Moments like this do have a way of reinforcing one's love for the game, in a bittersweet way.

Whew. Well, there's a basketball game to be played tonight, and you can imagine that if I got that worked up about a player not on my team, that his teammates are going to come out in a very focused frame of mind. As In noted in yesterday's post, the Knicks' chances of winning tonight's game are greatly improved by the rash of injuries to the Blazers. As with the Hawks, the Knicks ought to be able to take it into the interior (even though Przybilla did a good job of limiting opportunities in last year's game at MSG), and the injuries to Blazer wings like Outlaw and Fernandez will also make the Knick defensive challenge a bit more manageable.

As far as Portland's offense, I actually expect that they may be a bit tougher to handle than when Oden was around, because they'll become the type of perimeter team that gives the Knicks fits -- usually, the home team manages teams with slow, space eating big men better than they do teams with quicker players that can beat Duhon, Hughes and Chandler and tear into the less-than-imposing frontline of Harrington and Lee. The real X-factor will be Andre Miller, who destroyed the Knicks in the Sixers' four game sweep of the last season's regular season games -- his 23.5 points per game against New York was his highest against any opponent outside of the Hornets, and he also averaged 6.8 assists and 5 rebounds (with those rebounds seemingly always coming at crucial times).

Miller has a different role with the Blazers with Roy handling the ball as much as he does, and there was some early angst among Blazer fans about how well he fit with Roy and Blake, but he had his best game against the Rockets over the weekend (the infamous Oden game)  with 24 points, and got his teammates out of the very understandable funk they were in to rally them to victory. 

If the Knicks are going to win tonight, they will have to bring the usual ingredients to the table in terms of efficient offense and pushing the pace to a certain level. I suspect they'll be content with letting Roy getting his share of the offense (as Carmelo did in the Denver game), but they'll have to limit the damage done by players like Aldridge, Miller and Webster. Portland has always been one of the slowest paced teams in the league, and this season they're no different, so it should be a very interesting contrast in styles. 

Feeding my secondary fandom of the Traiblazers is easy with one of my very favorite basketball blogs, Blazersedge. It should be one of the first visits for any fan of the league, and especially the Traiblazers.

UPDATE: There are so many thoughtful pieces being written about what has happened with Greg Oden. A couple of my favorites come from Holly Mackenzie at The Score (Get Well Soon, G.O.)  and David Aldridge at NBA.com (Blazers Rally Around Oden). Two writers who love the game and manage to be thought-provoking whenever they write.