Teams find a lot of ways to motivate themselves for big games.
A fart, though, might just be a first for any professional sports team, but for the Knicks, it might have just been the secret to their success in their Game 5 win on Tuesday night.
The Athletic’s Fred Katz revealed on the “Knicks Film School” podcast on Thursday that an “epic fart” helped loosen up the Knicks’ locker room ahead of the blowout win that put them on the cusp of clinching the second-round series.
While the exact player who let out the crucial toot was not revealed, Katz appeared on “The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz” and provided more details on the event.
Katz told Le Batard revealed that the fart had plenty of noise but didn’t have any odor to it, calling it “loud but proud.”
“It was purely audio. As a matter of fact, when it happened, it strung along for a lot longer than one might expect for a fart of that volume and that context,” Katz said.
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“It actually didn’t get a reaction audibly at all. It got pure silence and a look over to that one player, and that one player looked around as if he was being inconspicuous and said with a completely straight face, ‘Something’s up with the pipes in here,’ and that got the huge laugh.”
The new details pushed Le Batard to suggest that it wasn’t so much the fart as it was the joke, which led to the easing of tension in the Knicks’ room after two straight losses in Indiana.
Whatever the case was, the Knicks completely turned things around from the Game 4 loss in Indiana and took a 30-point victory behind a 44-point effort from Jalen Brunson.
Game 6 will take place on Friday night at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indiana.