Corbin Explains: The Knicks are, like, whatever man

The Knicks are often bad, but honestly who cares. They are especially bad this year, with Porzingis sitting out a second with an injury and everyone else uhh, not being very good? It’s the fundamental truth of sports, people: usually, when your players are bad, your team will not be very good.

And that’s fine! Whatever man, who cares, someone has to be bad. Do you want a league where everyone goes 41-41 and seeding is just determined by obscure tiebreaker rules based on who you beat that year? No! I mean, maybe yes, a little, sitting around and having a weird online screaming match where you argue that the Blazers 20-point loss to San Antonio in March clearly makes their resume worse than the Lakers, what with THEIR 30-point victory over the Bucks in March, later in the season, when games should probably count for more, not really something anyone believed before this bizarre season where everyone went .500, but hey we have to make some standards in some way, sports are a swamp of madness whose only real purpose is finding the ultimate victor, to declare all teams equally worthy would be… well, it would be a nightmare.

But what ISN’T cool about the Knicks is how boring they are in this badness. This is a fun franchise in the abstract, what with their fun-mean crowd, their excellent broadcasting crew, their classic blue units, but this manifestation of the Knicks is just… stinky? I don’t know, man.

Zinger is cool, I suppose, but he’s injured and honestly, Embiid and Nikola are quickly stealing his weirdo-bigger-guy steez from him. When everyone is a unicorn, everyone is a horse.

The other players on this team are just wildly mediocre. Enes Kanter is a hero, in some ways, for spending his free time roasting Erdogan, for sure, but he plays insanely outdated basketball that is most notable for how it retroactively denigrates the aesthetic value of big man post play. It spoils nostalgia all on its own, makes the current moment the apex of the aesthetic of the league just by shoving a hideous example of the past in your face every night.

Hardaway Jr, Ron Baker: default NBA guards, biding their time on the Knicks until the day comes when the organization decides to get someone else and they drift along to some other team where they will play less. Trey Burke is on this team, a college guard who isn’t even close to being an NBA player.  Courtney Lee is probably the most distinguished guard on the squad, and he is a 3-and-D specialist who should be shipped off to a contender like, as quickly as possible. Ntilikina is good and could get better, barring one of the many hideous things that can derail a career in pro athletics happening. Kevin Knox has potential but is also like 19 years old.

Noah? Toast. On his way out to serve husky shreddaddy in Minnesota, it sorta seems like. Vonleh is getting some Knicks “could be good” hype but man I watched him in Portland for a while and I gotta tell you, my man might not have a solid understanding of what a basketball is.

It’s gonna be insanely bad, a squad farting their way to the lottery with a team full of sub-par NBA Professionals. In New York, where even modestly good teams are the stuff of legend, that is a colossal bummer, watching a squad just kind of die on the vine in a place with all that sun and soil quality.

BUT!

They need it! Really bad! No one has stuck on the Knicks for YEARS! Bottoming out is the only option for these guys, and yeah, it’s maybe a bummer that it’s getting thrust on them in this tedious manner. But man, it’s gotta be this way for this squad, they have to bottom out and replenish their talent pool and all that. It’s a shame that this team probably won’t be all that interesting in that failure but hey: why eat today what you can put off tomorrow?