They are eight simple words, but for Knicks fans who still choose to believe that things can break in their favor before the end of the season, they were eight of the most hopeful words available in the local basketball lexicon.
“I’m cleared for basketball activities,” Jalen Brunson said late Sunday afternoon, “whatever that means.”
Here’s what it mostly means: There is light at the end of the tunnel. There is comfort in knowing that Brunson, the team’s most essential player in addition to its most valuable, is ramping up in the gym at the Knicks’ Westchester facility, that as we near the calendar flipping from March to April and the playoffs come into clear view, Brunson will soon be a part of the proceedings again.
It isn’t as if the Knicks have fallen to pieces in Brunson’s absence. Heading into Sunday’s game at Madison Square Garden against the Blazers, the Knicks have played 11 games and won six of them. They have lost no ground in the Eastern Conference playoff race and still have comfortable leads over the three teams with the best chance to catch them for the No. 3 seed — Indiana, Detroit, Milwaukee — and took a magic number of five into the Portland game.
