The New York Knicks continue to be a walking paradox
It never ends. For the Knicks in the Jim Dolan era, mediocrity flows like an ocean, drowning everything in its path with its magnitudinous breadth. As the city which loves its basketball team watches that team dismantle itself from the inside — the annual line chart of presumptive hope resembling Enron stock in mid-2001 — Dolan shrugs off responsibility, and a trickle-down effect of indifference permeates Madison Square Garden like subway steam rising under a halal cart on the corner.
Perhaps you’re new to this whole NBA thing, or maybe just new to the Knicks. Maybe another rotten metaphor or two will convey the disgust boiling on the other end of your computer screen: Dolan is the Great Red Spot, although you could be forgiven for substituting Phil Jackson in his place in recent weeks. Dolan certainly has, allowing Jackson to continue increasing the buffoonery on his watch and, indeed, rewarding the erstwhile Zen Master by picking up the option for the remaining two years on his contract. Knicks fans wept.
For the sake of being thorough, the actual basketball deserves an examination. This season, the Knicks won 31 games and lost 51, actually a one-game regression from their win total last year. Risky signings and offseason moves largely didn’t pay off. Derrick Rose — when he could be bothered to show up, that is, having literally gone AWOL from the Knicks in early January — is approximately what everyone expected him to be: an injury-riddled shell of something that once was effective but, even at full health, may not be in today’s NBA. His jump shot is mostly nonexistent — he shot 21.7 percent from 3 this year, the lowest of his career — and his playmaking ability suffered. Those are just his on-court issues.
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Pop quiz, hotshot: without Googling, who led the Knicks in assists per game this season? The answer is a guy who isn’t even on the team anymore: Brandon Jennings, freed of his New York coil midseason and currently with the Wizards in the playoffs, where the Knicks haven’t been in four years. Rose was second, with 4.4 assists per game. That was good for 48th in the league, or behind the likes of Ty Lawson, Sergio Rodriguez, DeMarcus Cousins and Jordan Farmar.
Last summer, Joakim Noah signed a four-year, $72 million deal with the Knicks. In late March, Noah tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs and was subsequently hit with a 20-game suspension. This, after he’d already sustained a season-ending shoulder injury, for which it was announced this week that he would have offseason surgery.
This week alone has generated enough controversy to make Prince blush, and far more than any NBA team not named the Kings generates over the course of an entire season. After the Knicks picked up Jackson’s option, he held a staggering press conference in which he openly announced the team’s intentions to part with Carmelo Anthony, the team’s longtime pillar, this summer.
That announcement wasn’t terribly surprising, as it has become increasingly clear that Anthony’s timeline does not mesh with that of cornerstone-in-waiting Kristaps Porzingis. After beginning on relatively rocky ground upon the latter’s arrival via the 2015 draft, Anthony and Porzingis have developed a certain camaraderie, which is typically encouraging between a veteran and his protégé. Oh, also, Porzingis skipped his exit interview with Jackson this week, reportedly due to “frustration over dysfunction.”
Jackson is due to make $12 million for each year of service to the Knicks. Hans Gruber comes to mind: “They’ll spend a month sifting through the rubble, and by the time they figure out what went wrong — we’ll be sitting on a beach, earning 20 percent.”
Among many, many other reasons, the Knicks are frustrating because they are so aimless. After years of trading away draft picks and lighting money on fire via free agency, New York finally founds its next star in Porzingis, drafted the odd year when the Knicks hadn’t shipped away a lottery pick for the aging remnants of an All-Star. Following a promising rookie campaign from Porzingis, who flourished at times alongside Robin Lopez and fellow draftee Jerian Grant, the Knicks traded the latter two for Derrick Rose, an anachronistic and injury-prone former MVP whose marquee value far exceeds his VORP.
The Knicks remain committed to building for the future while simultaneously being competitive. What team has ever really done that? This year’s Bucks are the closest example to anything resembling that idea, and even they understand the need to undergo necessary growing pains. Jackson believes that being competitive will help attract top talent, but everyone except for him seems to see that getting to point B is impossible without ever getting to point A.
With the advent of social media and revenue-sharing, New York isn’t the be-all, end-all free agent destination against which smaller market clubs (read: everyone except for the Lakers, and look how they’re doing with free agents) must measure themselves. Even Jackson’s championship credibility is seemingly on its way out the window.
The aura of Madison Square Garden is largely built on the performances visiting players put in against the Knicks. Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Steph Curry have all had signature games in the Garden; when players talk about how special the arena is, they’re likely not giving much heed to Keith Van Horn putting up 30 against the SuperSonics in 2004. But, gee whiz, the way that theatre lighting shows up on TV…!
But then, it all goes back to Dolan, the man who hired and subsequently stayed with Jackson. Dolan, the billionaire owner of multiple sports franchises in the media capital of the world, is a man so petty he gets into arguments with fans outside his giant glass house and then bans those very people just because he can. The same goes for beloved former players, it seems, leaving little wonder as to why no marquee free agents don’t want to go to the Knicks in the first place.
Jackson is committed to the triangle, and he seems committed to Jeff Hornacek. The Knicks’ current head coach, who it took over a thousand words to mention, is a walking eyeroll emoji. We know just by watching him that he gets the score, and not just of whatever game the Knicks are losing on any given night.
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The Knicks plan to trade Anthony and pursue free agents. Porzingis is angry and going home for the summer, hopefully to shoot the Latvian version of Space Jam. When he returns, he’ll still be in a cartoon, but this time of Dolan’s and Jackson’s creation. The Knicks will go on being paradoxical, at once irrelevant and also dominating the news cycle. It never ends.