It is occasionally startling just how fast things change. Yes, this seems to be a particular phenomenon in New York, where the minute is now officially down to about 20 seconds, faster if there is a cab involved. One minute you are a triumphant Knicks team celebrating dispatching the pesky Boston Celtics and the Empire State Building is aglow in your colors. The next minute some guy named Roy Hibbert is stealing your lunch money and people are talking up the Pacers as potential upset contenders, five minutes after realizing Indiana was in the playoffs.  Yes, Manhattan is a tough room.  It could end up meaning a whole lot of nothing, just enough to get people’s knickers in a twist before the Knicks eventually make their plane reservations to Miami for the next round and people remember why Carmelo Anthony managed to steal a Most Valuable Player award vote from LeBron James. But for this minute anyway, the Knicks look completely discombobulated, as Ian Thomsen writes on SI.com, Anthony is showing a bit of wear and tear after running into Hibbert and someone else named David West, Ian O’Connor writes on ESPN.com, and writers like Mitch Lawrence of The Daily News are edging toward the alarm button about how Game 1 went down.  Let’s not forget there was some first-round flirting with the idea that the Knicks could squander a 3-0 lead to the Celtics, just like the Thunder could cough up a 3-0 lead over Houston. And yet there was Oklahoma City in the first game of its second-round series against Memphis looking all Thunder-y again and Kevin Durant was back in his superhero cloak, as Lee Jenkins writes on SI.com. Things change, things stay the same, sometimes all at once.  Oh yeah, and the Nets are looking for a coach again to plaster over their weaknesses, which is also change and more of the same. The biggest weakness this time is toughness, writes Filip Bondy in The Daily News, after dropping a Game 7 at home to a MASH unit wearing Chicago Bulls jerseys.  Actual ambulances may yet be needed in the N.H.L.'s first-round series between Montreal and Ottawa, which is trying in one fell swoop to wreck Canada’s reputation for niceness. There was blood, a giant brawl and coaches calling each other names in a series now led by Ottawa, 2-1, but the score is really being kept in lost teeth. And way too many people are giddy about this.  The thrills and spills are more about actual hockey in Pittsburgh’s suddenly wild series against the Islanders, which is turning out much more adventurous than the Penguins bargained for, writes Gene Collier in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. The West’s top seed, Chicago, also hit a bit of a speed bump in Minnesota’s Game 3 victory. The barrier for No. 3 seed Vancouver looks more like a wall after dropping three games to San Jose, and for a change the Canucks’ little goalie tango is not the main culprit, Cam Cole writes in The Vancouver Sun.  It is way too early for that kind of panic in baseball season, but the Angels are starting to think about it, with their latest big-money acquisition, Josh Hamilton, playing a small-money game these days, Jeff Passan writes on Yahoo.com. The Angels’ latest loss did come with a stumbling bit of comedy, thanks to Hank Conger’s bunt/somersault, but the laughter did not last long. The chuckles you hear are emanating instead from St. Louis, where they alternate between saying, “Albert who?” and just reveling in their surplus of pitching, writes Scott Miller on CBSSports.com.  But that’s baseball for you, things almost never happen quickly there.  Follow Leading Off on Twitter: twitter.com/zinsernyt  This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:  An earlier version of this column misspelled Angels catcher Hank Congerâs given name as Hang. An earlier version of a picture caption with this column misstated the day of Game 1 of the Knicks-Pacers series. It was Sunday, not Saturday.
Some sportswriters sounded the alarm after the Knicks looked discombobulated in Game 1 of their second-round series with Indiana.