Man, if the Knicks faithful are so easily worked into a frenzy by a player of Bobby Portis’ caliber, imagine how much they’d be freaking out on a regular basis if they had someone like, oh, Kevin Durant or Kyrie Irving. It would be pandemonium every single night.
I’m trying to kick Knicks fans while they’re actually not down for once, and it’s not working.
As it stands, they have to settle for Portis, who is great and brings a lot of energy, but it’s exactly in a top tier of anything besides punching out teammates and having big old googly eyes. I can sit here and make fun of him all I want, but he (and his inextinguishable desire for REVENGE against the Bulls) pretty much was the sole reason the Knicks won this game. He started off by victimizing Luke Kornet for 7 points in quick succession to get them back in the game, and he finished by hitting some threes to give them the lead near the end. Two of those threes were reward with a “BANG!” from Mike Breen, and the other, a “PUTS IT IN!”. You know a performance is gonna be frickin’ rad when it has multiple BANG!s in it.
I will say that the crowd chanting his name was maybe a little over the top. But who cares? They just want an exciting team that wins games to cheer for, Portis offered a brief tantalizing glimpse of such a team, and they couldn’t control themselves. Of course, had I been there, I’d have been staring dourly at everyone around me wishing that they would shut up, but a small part of me would’ve wanted to join in the chanting. There’s just something about intoning words that awakens something primal and religious inside me, inside everybody.
You have to be careful with it though. Sometimes chanting and intonations go wrong. Did anyone check the Madison Square Garden utility closets for freshly summoned ghouls?