COMMENTARY : Pacers in Control of Ewing

They’re clever people on this Pacers team. The coach shows them stuff on films. They didn’t think they could cause Patrick Ewing to have another one of those clunker games.

So they’d have to dare those other guys in the Knickerbockers’ road blue to beat them.

These are guys named Antonio Davis and Dale Davis and Rik Smits, in addition to Reggie Miller the household word. Who are those guys?

So Ewing came out Monday with all the energy he didn’t have in that other game here. He played a fine game. And the Pacers beat the Knicks in black and blue, beat them at their own game.

And so the Pacers have now beaten the Knicks here once when Ewing had the worst game any superstar ever had, and once when he had a good game, and that should do good things in their heads. It’s a perilous situation for the Knicks; they’ve lost six of seven road playoff games. A seventh game is a crapshoot even at home.

In the end it was the Pacers who were chuckling that their commotion on the bench caused Hubert Davis to let the Knicks’ last chance go through his hands.

“I’m upset,” Ewing revealed. “Very upset.”

With reason. The Pacers made the Knicks uncomfortable with defense, and the programed electronic interference in Market Square Arena. Whenever the Knicks had the ball there would be this automotive roar as if the Indy 500 were being rerun in the building. That’s unpleasant and disconcerting, and condoned by the league. However, it was the Knicks who recreated the Brickyard with their shooting.

“We knew Patrick was not going to have a performance like that again with all the phone calls he got about scoring one point, and the replays he saw on CNN and Late Night Sports,” said Lester Conner, the Pacers’ sage on the end of the bench. “Patrick did it and not too many other guys did it for them, and that’s a plus for us.”

Ewing came out with whatever it is he had in his mind. Only he knows. He knows with John Starks blunted by his incompletely recovered knee, he is the offense. Ewing insisted he wasn’t going to try to score 50, but then he was so juiced that his first shot went off the top corner of the backboard and his second clean over the rim.

“I came out wanting to have a better game,” Ewing said.

He did. He scored 25 points, pulled down 13 rebounds. At one point when the Knicks were coming from behind in the third period, Ewing made a shot from the corner and held his hands up as if signaling touchdown. On the next sequence his layup rolled off the rim and he stamped his feet in a tantrum. The Knicks were frustrating.

That was all included in the Indiana plan. The Knicks’ offense looks first to get the ball to Ewing, and Ewing looks first to score. With all those Pacers swarming around him, presenting a thicket for every entry pass, every shot was a labor.

No surprise. “I know they always double and triple me,” Ewing said. “Just got to make the plays.”

They were giving room to all those people on the outside: Dare you. “Larry Brown told us before the game,” Conner said, “if anybody makes a couple of threes, don’t get discouraged.”

If the Knicks can survive this, if they can survive themselves -- and the series is 2-2 with the Knicks still holding the homecourt advantage -- they’ll be bidding to be the palest offensive team ever to win the championship. Or something like that.

Can the great commissioner create an offense so heavy that even he can’t lift it?

“These are the two best defensive teams in the league going at each other tooth and nail,” Pat Riley disputed. Well, he wasn’t exactly going to say what was on his mind as he examined the court between his shoes after the last chance to save the game skittered between Hubert Davis’ three-point hands. Davis, Derek Harper, Charles Smith, Starks, Greg Anthony ... somebody has to do something or there’ll be one Indiana Davis in front and another behind all day. “He -- I don’t know which Davis it is -- tries to do a lot of things Bill Cartwright does to me,” Ewing said. “He fronts me and forces me out.”

Ewing had his admirable statistics line. However, he didn’t get a rebound in the fourth period, when they had their last chance to win. It’s hard for a man to rebound when he’s out as far as he was looking for a shot. If the defense rushes him, he might throw a bad pass.

There were times when Ewing was a spectator, watching while the ball was being tapped up and tapped up under the basket. That’s a limitation. But a man has to have more help than he got.

“We’re trying to keep the ball out of his hands as much as possible, make the other guys shoot,” Dale Davis said.

“I don’t think that team is going to beat you from beyond the arc,” Antonio Davis said.

In fact when the Knicks made their last mistake on their last realistic chance to tie, Ewing was looking to shoot from beyond the three-point arc.

The guards don’t get the ball to Ewing in the deep post often enough. Then again, they don’t move the ball on the outside well enough to get better shots for themselves. “If we’re moving it, we get those shots,” Harper said. “We can make those shots.”

That’s a two-headed issue. The alternative scorers (Smith, Harper, Starks, Davis and Anthony) made 14 of 42 shots. Not good. They committed 12 turnovers. Worse.

Starks made a layup to bring the Knicks within 80-77 and the Knicks got the ball back with 28.4 seconds to tie. Starks couldn’t get loose for a shot and neither could Harper. The ball went to Ewing at the arc. “I was going to shoot it,” Ewing said with a shy smile. “I was behind the line; I looked.”

He made a pump fake, Dale Davis lunged at him. Then Ewing saw Hubert Davis open for a three-pointer in the corner and passed. The Pacers on the bench noticed. They were all standing and yelling sweet nothings in Hubert’s ear.

“Yelling anything and everything,” Conner said. “ ‘Here it comes. Look out. Hurry up. Lots of time.’ And, do you know, Kenny Williams had just told us, Hubert Davis was going to miss the pass.

“And you know who was closest, yelling stuff? Larry Brown.”

It was a plan the Knicks’ couldn’t handle.