I’m pretty sure the Knicks commentators had never seen Mario Hezonja play before tonight. Not during the preseason, not during all the times the Magic came to visit, never. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been showering him with all the faint praise that they were. They wouldn’t sound so cautiously optimistic. Anyone who has watched Hezonja’s career unfold knows that for every flash of brightness that he emits, there are two or more soul-wrenching black holes of suck spreading outwards from his mortal body.
Maybe things are different now. He is out of the shadow of the franchise that pinned its hopes on him, and into the glow of a franchise who has no desire to win games or expect anything from its players. He can play his game. Even the supposedly harsh NY media will find it hard to criticize him too much, since that criticism could be cast in so many other directions.
As is typical for Hezonja, he scored a lot of points in garbage time. Unlike in Orlando, though, this was the good kind of garbage time. The winning kind of garbage time. He only had a little to do with the win, but a win it was, and that was a rare occurrence for him during his first few years.