They call it the best two words in sports, but “Game 7” sometimes can be classified as “last best chance.”
Just ask Tom Thibodeau.
Thirteen years ago, he guided the Bulls to the conference finals with the youngest MVP in NBA history and a ceiling seemingly higher than the Sears Tower.
They were destined for a post-Jordan golden era, until Derrick Rose’s knee buckled against the Sixers. LeBron James also formed a super-team in South Beach.
Stuff happens.
Thibodeau never got to the conference finals again. Sunday’s Game 7 against the Pacers will be his closest.
Unless he wins.
Then he’s a conference finalist for the first time since Barack Obama’s inaugural term.
“You’re not gonna win just because you’re at home,” the Knicks coach said Friday night, on the heels of a disappointing Game 6 defeat in Indy, “you have to put the work into it and we have to play well.”
The Knicks’ franchise?
They should benefit from the advantages of playing in the NBA’s biggest market, but haven’t advanced to the third round since the Clinton administration. In the Knicks’ case, a lot of bad stuff happened — too much to recap.
And though this iteration seems to have its house in order, there are no guarantees of upward trajectories continuing.
Take the Sixers, for example. Their “Process” fumbled without a conference finals appearance. Or check on the Hawks, Jazz and Grizzlies. They went from the “next big thing” to out of the playoffs within a year or two.
The Knicks, despite ready-made injury excuses, aren’t operating with house money Sunday — at least not in the grand or historical sense. The implications are too massive to toss a Game 7 loss aside as, “Oh well, they had too many injuries and they’ll be back next year.”
All five of their current starters — Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo, Isaiah Hartenstein, Miles McBride — had career-best seasons, and the Knicks can only hope, without guarantee, that those players duplicate such production next season.
The worst-case scenario, as predicted by Draymond Green, is a dramatic fall off.
“It’ll probably be another 15 years of misery, and we’ll all sit around and laugh at Knicks fans with their delusion, because that’s just what happens,” the four-time champion said last week.
The hyperbole of Green’s take aside, there are elements either out of the Knicks’ control or too difficult to predict moving forward. Free agency, the trade market and draft are, more often than not, crapshoots. What the Knicks can control is the result Sunday afternoon. They fought with ferocity for the second-seed, earned it, and got their big Game 7 at home.
“It’s what you live for. It’s why you sign with the Knicks,” DiVincenzo said. “Come home, play in front of the Garden, Game 7. It’s gonna be rocking, and that’s what we love.”
MSG has indeed been kind to the Knicks, where they’re 5-1 in the playoffs. But to reiterate the rarity and importance of Sunday’s opportunity, they haven’t hosted a Game 7 since 1995.
And they haven’t closed out a playoff series at home in a quarter of a century.
The best Game 7 Knicks performance was much longer before that — in 1970, “The Willis Reed Tunnel Game” — and the triple-double catalyst of that night isn’t worried about all the injuries currently plaguing the team.
“I kind of view it like our destiny,” Clyde Frazier told The Post. “No matter who goes down, somebody steps up. So I’m riding with that. Like Game 7 [of the 1970 NBA Finals] — when we played the Lakers. If we played them two days after that, I don’t think we would’ve won. That night was our night.
“Willis came out, they got psyched out, the crowd went crazy, I had my game. It just all fell in place. I’m kind of thinking that way with the Knicks.”
As Knicks fans understand, the opportunity for aligning stars doesn’t happen very often. And neither do conference finals appearances. Even with a decimated roster and a potentially compromised Hart, the Knicks can’t let this one slip away.