Hardwood Paroxysm Super-Overreacts to the NBA Finals, Free Agency, and Derek Fisher
Everybody’s Doing The Fish
by Andrew Lynch (@AndrewLynch)
We were told this wouldn’t happen. We were told there was no way that hipsters would get Derek Fisher named head coach of the New York Knicks.
Do you remember the environmental impact study done when the Nets moved to Brooklyn?
We tried to tell them that this would happen, but they responded that we were overreacting. We called everyone “hipsters,” so the term had no meaning. We heard them say these things, tears streaked across our cheeks, and we wondered if they were right.
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The report was the usual bureaucratic pomp and ceremony — a check mark here, a nod to increased air and noise pollution there. All the ducks were in a row, and everything fell into place. The Nets would relocate. New York would have its second basketball team, officially. And everyone would make lots of money. There would be a rivalry to play up, and games every night. For horror fans, there would even be a brand new mascot.
We panicked, but it was with good reason. What of the trends, we cried? What if they began to seep out of Brooklyn and into the soil of real New York? What would we do when the groundwater became contaminated, and we with it?
No mention was made, however, of the possibility of an entirely new kind of environmental threat. It was … something we’d never seen before. We should have listened when they mentioned its possibility. But we didn’t.
We’d seen trends before. The NBA is a copycat league, after all. Have success with a scheme or an approach, and everyone else will dive in and figure out how to emulate it.
This was different. When the league moved to Brooklyn, it opened the floodgates — trends for their own sake. The trend of trendiness. Trend-indipity.
Sure, it started in California. The modern thirst for coaches with zero coaching experience whatsoever has a long and storied past in the Golden State, where the Warriors first broke ground with the hire of Mark Jackson, fresh from the ESPN broadcast booth.
And though Golden State doubled down with the recent addition of Steve Kerr to replace Jackson, it was Brooklyn that turned one team’s decision into a trend. As with any good bandwagoning, however, the Nets knew better than to simply plot the course already set before them. They one-upped the Warriors, naming Jason Kidd as their head coach before Kidd had so much as a chance to enjoy a summer away from the game.
So now it was the Knicks’ turn. It seems that New York was at first willing to latch onto the trend with the same devotion James Dolan shows to the root and diminished fifth. Kerr was the man for the job — a first-year coach with no experience, yes, but one who’d worked as a general manager and been retired for over a decade. The Knicks were drinking the Brooklyn Kool-Aid, but the amount of Nets in the water was still best measured in parts-per-million.
When the Warriors snagged Kerr, the ratio of Brooklyn to New York became something more akin to one’s BAC — measurable by percentage, and probably more than a little bit indicative of intoxication. And the Knicks, in turn, went all in on the no-experience trend. Hell, they managed to one-up the one-uppers, like some sort of mutant Mario brother, by coming to an agreement with a new head coach who hasn’t even officially retired yet. Player-coaches might not be allowed under the current rules of the NBA, but New York is going to get as damn close as possible to having one.
None of this is to say that the hire of Derek Fisher by the New York Knicks is a bad decision. Fisher might end up being a very good coach, and he’ll certainly communicate well with the front office.
But the Knicks have gone full Nets. We should have known this would happen. We should have known.