Isiah Thomas and Mateen Cleaves were sitting together in their front-row Garden seats, talking the whole night about the stunning toughness and poise being shown by Markquis Nowell. Cleaves once won a championship for Michigan State after thinking he had broken his ankle during that 2000 title game against Florida.
In 1988, as a member of the Detroit Pistons, Thomas overcame a badly sprained ankle to score 25 points against Magic Johnson’s Lakers in the third quarter of Game 6 of the NBA Finals.
So these distinguished guards had earned their right to critique every move that Nowell — 5-foot-8 in elevator shoes — was making after he returned from his ankle injury early in the second half Thursday and kept picking apart the Michigan State defense in the Sweet 16. And Nowell, the undisputed king of New York on this night, had earned the right to look at them with a minute and change left in overtime and mouth these two words:
Watch this.
Watch him throw an alley-oop pass to Keyontae Johnson that would lead to an acrobatic reverse dunk and the winning points in a college basketball game that no witness will ever forget.
“It was just a basketball play between me and Keyontae,” Nowell would say.
Just like his steal off fellow New York point guard Tyson Walker on the last Spartans possession was just a basketball play. Just like his mad dash down the floor and reverse layup to beat the buzzer and freeze the 98-93 final score in forever’s lights was just a basketball play.
Out of Harlem, Nowell finished with 20 points and an NCAA Tournament record 19 assists. He finished with five steals and only two turnovers, and left the valiant Walker, the Michigan State star out of Christ the King High in Queens, face down on the floor in defeat while the Wildcats mobbed their quarterback down the other end.
“This is my city,” Nowell had said on the court.
“This one was special in front of my hometown,” he said later, “in front of the city that loves me.”
His Twitter handle is “MrNewYorkCityy” for a reason. His profile says he “always believed that one day I would be big” for a reason.
Nowell played two of his high school seasons at Bishop Loughlin in Fort Greene, and faced off a couple times against Walker. They had to jump from mid-majors to their Power Five destinations and to this surreal matchup in the Garden, and on the eve of the game Nowell said he wanted “to give a big shout-out to New York City for breeding tough and gritty guards.”
As it turned out, the toughest and grittiest player on the floor was Nowell, who went down in a heap with his ankle injury and somehow returned to put on a remarkable show.
In the immediate wake of his injury, Nowell had given the Wildcats a thunderous jolt of energy. He ran down a loose ball and banked home a lunging 3-pointer to beat the shot-clock buzzer before hobbling and hopping one-legged down the floor. Nowell then strip-stole the ball from Michigan State and assisted on the basket that regained the lead that was lost when he was being treated on the bench.
“Mateen and I were constantly talking about how he controlled the game,” Thomas told The Post. “Markquis took advantage of every mistake Michigan State made, and he read every pick-and-roll right. He was great, and then after he got injured he was even greater.”
Thomas said he did flash back to his performance against the Lakers 35 years ago more than once: “And when Markquis made that crazy shot off the glass, I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a bad night.’ ”
Nowell had heard all the stories about the Isiah Finals against the Lakers. But the Kansas State playmaker wasn’t thinking about that when he saw Thomas in the stands, sitting with Cleaves and other Michigan State dignitaries.
“He was rooting for them,” Nowell said. “And I’m like, ‘You’re not going to win today.’ And I just kept looking at him for some added motivation.”
Nowell controlled the whole game with the pass, slicing and dicing the Michigan State defense with no-look and full-look dishes, bounces and lobs. He also launched a 3-pointer from the right wing and looked away from the ball in flight before it was halfway home.
This was Nowell’s first appearance in the Garden, and it seemed like he’d been playing here his entire life. Frankly, given the signature moment of the late, great Willis Reed’s career, this was the most fitting available angle on the board.
“I wasn’t going to let a little injury like this that happens on the basketball court all the time stop me from playing in the Sweet 16 and advancing to the Elite Eight,” Nowell said.
He compared this epic struggle to “a ‘Rocky’ fight,” with Michigan State ending up on the canvas. Way back when, Tom Izzo was the victim in the Garden when Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski beat him to break Bob Knight’s all-time victories record. This one hurt a lot more.
Izzo said his team was “got caught mesmerized on Nowell,” as good a description as any. Isiah Thomas told The Post that the Kansas State star is “absolutely an NBA player. It was special to be here to watch him.”
At the end of a magical Garden night, a full house would say Amen to that.
