Vince Carter Remains Vince Carter, Drains Threes Over Hapless Knicks

If you have not watched a Hawks game on TV lately, you may have missed a number of ESPN graphics reminding you incessantly and in various creative ways that Vince Carter is old, older than his team’s entire roster combined, old enough to be Trae Young’s dad’s dad, so old he played pickup with James Naismith and so forth. Carter, for his part, seems content to keep his head down and hoop, and he had a very fun go of it on Wednesday night against the Knicks at MSG, when he put up 14 points in the second quarter on a series of threes that became successively more audacious.

This reached its natural conclusion: Carter took a heat check shot so preposterous that physics could not acquiesce, and he ended up sitting for most of the second half anyway, ending his delightful run. On the broadcast, Doris Burke very diplomatically suggested the Knicks’ defense was “uh, certainly helping” Carter’s cause. Indeed, this performance might not be a testament to Carter’s longevity so much as it is a worrying sign that Knicks’ marquee free agent Julius Randle can be smoked pretty easily. (I know, I know, it’s the preseason.)