ANALYSIS : Knicks Up Against the Wall, Again

Now they have to do it all over again, go through the waiting, the tension, the silence in the dressing room before the game. They will have joy or they will punish themselves.

“I’m loving it,” Derek Harper said, leaving his questioners to decide whether he meant it or not.

John Starks would speak no word to express himself, but he left no doubt about what he was feeling. He had the last shot and he made the last mistake, and he had played a stunning game, shooting life into the Knicks and grinding that defense into the Rockets.

The Rockets won Game 6, 86-84, and Starks tried to win it -- not tie it -- with the last shot from deep on the wing as the clock burned out. And Hakeem Olajuwon, so wonderfully agile, got his big hand up and deflected the ball.

And as the crowd of notebooks and microphones and cameras crowded into the dressing room, Starks secluded himself as much as a man can in a crowd. He sat wearing just a towel draped across his midsection, his feet on a chair, ice on his left knee. He rested his chin on two fingers of his left hand and closed his eyes.

“John is not talking,” a functionary advised.

Shortly afterward, Starks got up and left the scene. This is the third time in these playoffs that Starks has found defeat and his role unspeakable. This time, with 40.7 seconds to play, he’d thrown an interception to this man Olajuwon, and Starks smacked himself on the side of his head. Dumb play, his body language said.

“He’s hard on himself,” Harper said. “He’s s perfectionist. After Game 1, he was hard on himself. He came back and played well. I expect the same.”

Starks scored 27 points. He was all over the boxscore. Harper, however, had a poor shooting night. A lot of games are won by the big men during the regular season; in the half-court grind of playoffs, the burden falls on the guards like a safe falling out of the sky. “John gave us a chance to win,” Harper said. “He singlehandedly carried us in the fourth quarter.”

Starks scored 16 points in the last quarter. It wasn’t enough.

The Knicks had come from nine points behind early in the fourth quarter to cut the margin to 78-77 on Starks’ three-pointer. The defense was grinding so hard, forcing the Rockets to burn the shot clock getting up the court.

Harper had done another sensational job closing down Kenny Smith before he hit a three-pointer. It was 84-77, the Summit was shuddering with sound, and the Knicks were coming back again. “That’s just the way we are,” Harper said. “I guess we’re destined to do it the hard way; we couldn’t do it any other way.”

The hardest was in Starks’ mind. He can cause his team to win. He saw how he had permitted them to lose.

He made a layup on a break and then a three-pointer, and the Knicks were two points behind with 1:17 to play. He forced a turnover and he was taking the ball into the teeth of the defense.

He drove the middle, intending to draw Olajuwon into leaving Patrick Ewing open, coming out of the corner. Olajuwon wasn’t named the top defensive player in the league for nothing. “I faked and went back to Ewing,” he said. “I gambled; that’s what they’d been doing all game.”

Starks tried to hook his pass, and Olajuwon stepped in front of it. And Starks smacked his head.

One more chance. Harper forced Smith to waste the shot clock until it was into its last second before taking an awkward shot. Then Starks had 7.6 seconds for another chance. Houston gave a foul and then there were 5.5 seconds.

They’d spent the whole day or even the whole year getting to this point. There had been the silence in the pre-game dressing room. Ewing sat there bouncing the ball to the rhythm of the music in his headset. He didn’t speak. Greg Athony watched a tape of the fifth game. He didn’t speak. Starks wrapped foam around a camera and didn’t speak.

A double-spread front page of Mark Messier clutching the Stanley Cup hung in Harper’s locker. He brought it from his locker in New York; it spoke volumes for him.

“The tension is crazy,” said the veteran who’d never been in the Finals before. “You have to go through it to have the feeling; I can’t tell you. I’d never expereienced it. It’s the best feeling I ever had in my life -- except when my son was born.”

Charles Oakley passed inbounds to Starks, going left. The set was there for him to create a shot. Olajuwon went with him. “I was just hoping to get close to the ball with five seconds left,” Olajuwon said, then tipped his smile to the danger of the ball in Starks’ hands.

Maybe Starks could have taken the ball around Olajuwon for a tying layup. Maybe. “He made a choice,” Pat Riley said. “If you don’t take the first real good look at it, you may never get another.”

Before the dressing room opened, Harper said his few cliches to Starks. Anything to help at a time like that. “I told him he had given us a chance to win,” Harper said. “He said, ‘OK.’ ”

And that left the mindset to be reset for two days of practice, two days of waiting, and then the tension again. They are remarkably similar and remarkably equivalent teams. Of all the players, only Earl Cureton of the Rockets has ever been on a champion. He hasn’t been in one of these games.

Harper, after a flurry of good games, went cold. He made two of 10 shots. “I had a bad shooting night in Game 1,” he remembered. This time he made a three-pointer in the middle of the third period when the game was getting away, and a steal from Sam Cassell, the slick rookie, to get some momentum going for the Knicks. He shot poorly, he didn’t play poorly.

He sat there with ice on both of his worn knees. One game left to play. “It’ll be a long wait, a tough wait,” he said. “It was very tough for me to sleep. All sorts of stuff was running through my system.

“I loved it.”

Now he can love it one more time. This is the third time they’ve faced Game 7. They’ve been waiting since October.