Tom Thibodeau didn’t hold back when describing the opportunity that the Knicks had let pass them by on Tuesday night.
A chance to finish a grueling six-game road trip with a 4-2 record, and to cap that trip off by clinching the franchise’s first playoff berth in eight years, slipped away with one rebound to Wesley Matthews, who put back a missed 3-point attempts to force overtime in an eventual Lakers win.
Thibodeau’s group didn’t hold back its frustration either, knowing the chance that had vanished along with the team’s 10-point fourth quarter lead.
“It’s tough, extremely tough, but by the end of the night tomorrow when you wake up, you have to have amnesia,” Derrick Rose said. “But it’s f-king hard right now. When you get so emotionally involved and playing hard, you get lost in the game. You want the outcome to be in your favor. It just sucks, man.”
Rose couldn’t close out Matthews in the closing seconds of regulation, leading to the game-tying putback to force overtime, where the Lakers closed out the win on a 3-pointer by Talen Horton-Tucker with 13 seconds left.
“I was coming in from the corner trying to play backside and by that time he was already boxing me out,” Rose said. “I probably should have fouled him, throw him down to the ground or something, but he was already in his stance boxing me out from me leaving my guy in the corner and trying to get down to the baseline…we’ll probably look at film and Thibs will yell at me about it, but it is what it is.”
The Knicks could have avoided overtime, but a running floater from Julius Randle as the fourth quarter clock expired wouldn’t fall, leaving the Knicks in sixth place in the East instead of fourth, and still needing a win or a Celtics loss in the last three games to clinch.
“It sucks,” Randle said. “It’s tough, but we control our own destiny. We just have to get back home and finish the job.”
The clearly frustrated Knicks will be back at the Garden on Thursday night to try and finish off what they couldn’t on Tuesday, and beat the Spurs to clinch a coveted playoff spot. But first, they’ll have to put Tuesday’s devastating loss behind them.
“You gotta say something to them,” Thibodeau said. “We came out of the trip 3-3 and one rebound away from having a win tonight, and we have to learn…it’s been a long road trip and there’s been a lot of fight, but we have to understand the intensity at the end of the game, and it’s going to be a quick turnaround when we get home. We have to be ready when we get home.”
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