Raptors 98 – Knicks 88
TORONTO – Latrell Sprewell stood up in the locker room and addressed his teammates again yesterday after a pitiful 98-88 defeat at the hands of the Raptors at Air Canada Centre.
With Marcus Camby sitting out his second straight game with back spasms, the Knicks have hit another crisis. This time a Canadian crisis.
Their robotic, disinterested performance was stunning. The Knicks were facing a club that now has beaten them in their last six regular-season meetings. The Knicks were coming off a humiliation in Chicago.
And they were going against Chris Childs for the first time since the team swapped point guards. The same Childs who said he wanted to inflict as much misery as possible on the Knicks.
And he did. Childs was the best point guard on he floor with a solid 12-point, five-rebound performance and terrific in-your-shorts defense. He even stole the spotlight from Vince Carter (25 points).
Childs, in 26 minutes off the bench, clearly outplayed his replacement Mark Jackson, who was benched in the fourth quarter, and Charlie Ward. In a slap at his struggling point guards, Jeff Van Gundy used the Big Backcourt alignment twice yesterday, including down the stretch.
Childs, meanwhile, ran the show for Toronto and tauntingly stared down the Knick bench twice after making shots, rubbing salt in the Knicks’ bloody wounds. The Knicks now have lost seven straight road games – the longest dry spell since the 1987-1988 season.
“I wasn’t going to let us lose,” said Childs, whose club is 5-0 with him in the lineup. “Once you have them down, and they’re out of breath, you have to step on their throats and put them to sleep.”
“He had the last laugh today,” Spree said.
But captain-in-spirit Spree did not take this loss sitting down. In another State-of-Sprewell Address, the last one coming after the Miami loss in December, he urged his mates to rediscover their passion for the game and not to be shy about getting on underachieving teammates.
“If I have to be that person to be more vocal and be the jerk on the team, so to speak, it’s something I’m willing to do to get us to snap out of it,” said Sprewell, who attacked Toronto’s defense and bagged 27 points. “When going through rough times you have to do some things differently.”
Apparently, nothing changed following Friday’s horrifying loss to the “Horri-Bulls.”
“Guys are down,” Spree said. “The easy thing to do in a situation like this is say I did my part. I want guys on this team to look at themselves in the mirror and find a way to do something extra to help us snap out of this. If you’re a shooter, shoot the ball; if you’re rebounder, get the ball; if you’re a defender, stop somebody.
“We have to start pushing guys more and have some kind of passion about ourselves,” Spree added. “If someone’s not doing their job, other guys need to say, ‘You’re not doing your job.’
“We need to put more pressure to step it up and perform better. The only way to do that is if you know other guys are pushing you. It makes you work harder.”
Both Spree and Jeff Van Gundy noted that even though the Knicks rallied from 17 points down in the fourth quarter, cutting it to six in the final minute with the ball, the club did not sense it could win.
“I mentioned this to couple of guys in the shower,” Spree said. “We made runs and there was no excitement, no chest-bumping, high-fives.”
With 30 seconds left, trailing by six, Glen Rice, who’s been playing miserably recently, threw the ball away on a crosscourt pass. Rice was 2 for 9 for the second straight night.
“The way we’re playing there’s not enough passion to win,” Van Gundy said. “Down six, we just threw it away. There was no outward sign of emotion that we threw a chance away that was our last. We go about our business the wrong way.”
With Camby out, the Raptors appeared so much more athletic than the Knicks, with swingmen Morris Peterson and recent pickup Keon Clark skying for offensive boards. The Raptors hauled in 17 offensive rebounds. The Kicks were outrebounded 44-32 overall.
