Which is worse — rooting for the Clippers or the Knicks?
It’s often said the worst place an NBA franchise can find itself is mediocrity. The best teams chase titles; the worst chase ping-pong balls. To be middle-of-the-road — not good enough to contend; not bad enough to land a high lottery pick — is a kind of hell. That’s been the traditional thinking in the NBA for a long time now. The Chicago Bulls won six titles in eight years, yet ownership preferred pulling the plug and starting over to a protracted fade to mediocrity. The Boston Celtics watched Larry Bird and company age and break down and got stuck in exactly the morass the Bulls were afraid of; it’d be nearly 20 years before they’d threaten to win another title.
But it’s a new day, both in the NBA and the way we follow it. There are only a couple consensus contenders, per usual, but thanks to League Pass and NBA TV and NBA Twitter and the constant crush for content that’s spawned a million billion websites, fans enjoy great access than ever before. Yet increased access often means decreased intimacy; we learn more about a wide range but less about its depths. Or to put it another way, let’s consider which team is harder to root for: the Los Angeles Clippers, who trail Utah 1-0 in their first-round series, or the New York Knicks, who are missing the playoffs for the 12th time in 16 years.
A few years ago, the Clips were the Warriors before Golden State became THE WARRIORS: a high-powered, exciting West Coast dynamo whose highlights caused shock and awe. The Clippers were the dominant team in the nation’s second-largest city for six years; when this run started, LeBron was ring-less and the ubuntu Celtics were still a thing. L.A. has won 60 percent or more of its games the last six seasons. From 1970 to 2011, the Buffalo Braves/San Diego Clippers/L.A. Clippers never did. This would seem to be a good thing, something all fans of all franchises dream of — a golden age.
But Los Angeles has never reached an NBA Finals or Conference Finals, and no one, probably including the players and coaches themselves, expect them to break either duck this year. For non-Clipper fans, the team has settled into the role of a telenovela villain: objectively attractive, mildly dangerous, but ultimately flawed and doomed to fail. As a result, nothing they accomplish resonates, despite another impressive campaign.
L.A. was second in the NBA in double-digit wins, behind Golden State. They beat Cleveland by 19 with LeBron, Kyrie Irving and Love playing, and 30 with the Big Three absent. The Clippers were the only team to win the season series against San Antonio. Nobody cares. The Warriors, Cavs, Spurs had better years and have already won titles, so they matter. The Houston Rockets reached the Conference Finals a couple years ago and are a supercharged new version of themselves, so they matter. Los Angeles is a day-old donut while freshies keep coming out of the oven.
On the opposite coast, the New York Knicks have been lousy for almost 20 years. This week was exhibit 39,737 that no team can match New York for spectacular negative headlines: team president Phil Jackson publicly railroaded Carmelo Anthony, alienated Kristaps Porzingis and blamed everyone but himself for the Knicks’ yearly failings under his watch, all in 49 minutes. As flagrantly embarrassing as New York is off-the-court, they’ve mostly been just middle-of-the-road bad over the same two decades. Being bad at being bad, coupled with many, many years without their own first-round pick, resulted in the Knicks only having one top-five pick in all those lean years — and now he’s alienated. This June the Knicks will either pick 1,2,3, or 6-10, with the odds favoring the latter range. And so it goes.
Which is worse: to root for a team that raises hopes it never delivers on? Or the drudgery of year after year with one that offers none? Both teams have some experience with the other’s predicament. The last time New York was any good was the 1990’s, teams revered nowadays but who were known at the time for failing to get past the Jordan Bulls, the Olajuwon Rockets, and the Twin Tower Spurs. Those three teams won 10 titles between them, the Knicks won zero, though they were usually close; Knick fans today would kill for another run of winning a playoff series 11 out of 12 years, reaching four Conference Finals and two NBA Finals. Clipper fans probably would, too.
Between 2000 and 2009, the Clippers had 10 top-10 draft picks, four of them top-five. Two of those lottery picks set the foundation for their recent run of success: Blake Griffin arrived in 2009, and the year before the team selected Eric Gordon, the centerpiece in the masterful Chris Paul trade two years later. If the 21st century Knicks had a similar draft history to L.A., they’d probably be closer to where the Clippers are than where New York is and always seem to be.
Maybe neither team ever satisfies because both are forever chasing ghosts. The Clippers may have never won it all, but even if they did, even if they repeated or three-peated, they’ll never be the Lakers, the NBA’s glamour franchise. Whether the Knicks are good or bad, they’re forever chasing the memory of the team and city’s only two championship teams from the 1970’s, a halcyon ghostly group of selfless geniuses and Hall-of-Famers who all subscribed to 5>1.
Clipper fans will face dark times after this group says goodbye; their Finals-level-intensity first-round victory of the Spurs a couple years ago will be appreciated in a way it can’t be now, when they’re still ostensibly trying and failing to win it all. Knick fans suffered a 17-65 tank job a couple years ago, and many fans felt that once was enough.
Next: Carmelo Anthony at the End of the World
So, who’s easier to root for: Los Angeles or New York? Maybe the answer is as flawed as the question. To be a sports fan is to be subjected to people and forces and histories and coincidences outside our awareness. We don’t choose why we root anymore than we do who we root for. If we could, maybe more of us wouldn’t, period. That doesn’t sound easier, or any more fun, whether your team falls just short or never rises high enough to fall.