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What happened next, too, was Basketball 101: Lin stopping just past the top of the key to get Atlanta’s defense to commit, then feeding Anthony for a vicious, unimpeded dunk at Madison Square Garden.
That Lin-to-Anthony second quarter play, which gave the Knicks a 17-point lead en route to their eventual 99-82 victory Wednesday, offered one example of what they sought before flying off to Miami to face their sternest test of the Linsanity Era Thursday against the Miami Heat:
Their shooting-star point guard on the same page with their superstar forward, however simple the play.
It wasn’t like that all night, with Anthony flinging his first pass of the night crosscourt, far over Lin’s head, much like Anthony heaved a similar pass over Landry Fields’s head later in the opening quarter.
Still, on the first anniversary of the Knicks’ trade for Anthony, they’re again a work in progress, as they’ve been for most of Coach Mike D’Antoni’s tenure, with all the trades and transactions of his previous three seasons.
So, however small the baby step, the Lin-to-Anthony dunk represented progress, as did the ease with which the Knicks dispatched the undermanned Hawks in the wake of two losses to sub-.500 teams sandwiched around Sunday’s victory over Dallas.
Their defense had a lot to do with that, forcing seven turnovers in eight Atlanta first-quarter possessions as they dashed off a 16-0 game-breaking run.
Anthony, in only his second game back after he sat out seven with a groin injury, shook off some rust, converting 7 of 16 shots for 15 points before sitting out the final quarter.
But Lin, on the Sports Illustrated cover for the second week in a row (the first New York-based athlete to do so), kept on keeping on with 17 points, 9 assists and 4 turnovers. D’Antoni even reinserted him in the final quarter with 5 minutes 3 seconds left and the Knicks up 20.
Amar’e Stoudemire, also part of the get-everyone-on-the-same-page equation, delivered only 7 points, but grabbed 10 rebounds while also sitting out the final quarter.
All that and more helped the Knicks christen the second half of this truncated season with their ninth victory in 11 games since Lin’s Feb. 4 breakout performance against the Nets.
However, unlike their losses last week to New Orleans and then in Monday’s rematch against the Nets, the Knicks played with enough offensive crispness to suggest they may get it, eventually.
Lin, for instance, also found Anthony for a third-quarter 3-pointer at the top of the key after grabbing the rebound of a missed Tyson Chandler free throw, then for a rather tame dunk on the right block later in the quarter with a delivery across the key.
A quarter earlier, Chandler grabbed a rebound of a miss by Fields (16 points) and kicked it out to Lin for a 3.
The newcomers Baron Davis (6 assists) and J.R. Smith (12 points) also hooked up on a pair of alley-oops to shake off some of their rust, and Steve Novak continued his post-Lin breakout by scoring 17.
The Knicks, though, sustained some second-half lethargy, allowing a 30-point lead shrink to 13 against a team playing without their All-Stars Joe Johnson and Al Horford.
As D’Antoni said, though, after Thursday’s game and the All-Star Weekend that follows, the Knicks play only once in six days, enabling them to get the kind of practice time to get the offense in tune that they haven’t had since Lin’s emergence.
“We’ll have five practices and one game to figure everything out and try to make a run toward the end and really look like a good team,” D’Antoni said.
They’ll have a chance to make a run up the playoff standings, too, where the Knicks moved within three games in the loss column of the Hawks, who are sixth in the Eastern Conference and have now lost three of their last four games.
REBOUNDS
Iman Shumpert sat out his second straight game with left patellar tendinitis and, as a result, he pulled out of this weekend’s All-Star slam-dunk competition. ... Utah’s Jeremy Evans was named to replace Shumpert, who’s expected to return after the All-Star break. ... Mike D’Antoni also expects the rookie big man, Josh Harrellson, back after the break after he underwent surgery on the right wrist he fractured Jan. 24. ... Bill Walker, who sat out his third straight game with a left elbow injury, is also expected back after the All-Star Game. ... Commissioner David Stern replaced Johnson with Rajon Rondo. ... In other Linsanity news, New Era released a “Linsanity” hat Wednesday, while Hachette Book Group announced that a new book, “Jeremy Lin: The Reason for the Linsanity,” by Timothy Dalrymple was due in stores in May.
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