SHOOTING FROM THE LIP
We should admire those Knicks fans who are shelling out so much to watch and wait for Phil’s future team
When you add it all up, the Knicks played exactly one meaningful game this season: The first one, on the night when they went into Cleveland and spoiled LeBron James’ official return to that city and to the Cavaliers.
They beat the Cavs and shocked the world and nobody knew at the time that this would be a team to make Mike Woodson’s last season with the Knicks, when his team finished 37-45, seem as much like the good old days as if Woodson had Clyde and Capt. Willis and Bradley and DeBusschere and Earl the Pearl playing for him.
The Knicks have played more than 70 games of garbage time since that night in Cleveland. You now get lightheaded occasionally, trying to figure out which summer is going to be the one when Phil Jackson begins to work his magic and begins to turn things around, whether it is this summer or the summer of 2016. But then Knicks’ basketball has become as much a summer sport as the Rucker League now.
After everything that has happened since the end of the 2001 season, when James Dolan officially became the big basketball boss at Madison Square Garden, after all the bad things that have happened on and off the court and the only meaningful renovation at the Garden has involved remaking the building — and after as much losing as any team in the NBA has done in these 14 years — the Knicks hit bottom now.
Not just the bottom of the standings in their division and conference and league. Just the bottom, period.
In a handful of games they finish out as bad a season any New York sports team has ever had, in anything. You can say that Rich Kotite’s Jets really were worse that time at 1-15, or talk about the ‘62 Mets, even though that is pretty insulting to Casey and Choo Choo Coleman and Marvelous Marv, because that team was at least able to win one out of every four games it played.
Give all credit to the Knicks’ fans who have the money and the patience and enough love for the NBA that they keep coming to the Garden to watch the visiting team play basketball. The Knicks’ attendance throughout this lost season, the way it has held, is one of the oddest single moments in NBA sports history. Because it is not as if the bottom suddenly just fell out on the New York Knicks, they have been in a freefall for a long time.
The only shining basketball moment was after Woodson took over from Mike D’Antoni and finished 18-6 and got the Knicks to the playoffs and then got them to 54-28 the season after that, and an Atlantic Division title. Woodson probably wonders where all that patience — and lack of booing, and lack of anger — was for a coach who actually gave Knicks fans some winning after all the losing of the Dolan era.
It is always worth remembering that since the start of the 2001-02 season, all Knicks coaches who weren’t Woodson are more than 200 games under .500. He was 30 games over .500 in his two-plus years coaching the Knicks, and gave the team its only victory in a playoff series since Jeff Van Gundy was still here, back in the spring of 2000.
But then you were supposed to believe that the Knicks coached themselves when Woodson was here. “Fire Woodson!” they chanted at the Garden. Jackson did that the first chance he got, because he needed a disciple, even though Jackson’s coaching tree actually looks like a tree that misses its leaves in wintertime. He thought Steve Kerr would jump at the chance to come here, and the money Jackson was prepared to throw at him. Kerr wised up and went to Golden State and may win a championship there, and do it this year. So he threw $25 million at Derek Fisher instead.
Now a full season into the Phil Jackson era, and despite all the praise Jackson has heaped on Fisher, we still don’t know if Fisher has the chops to coach an NBA team anymore than we know if Jackson has the chops and energy and vision to build one.
Woodson, who now sits next to Doc Rivers in Los Angeles, was in town the other night as the Clippers did everything except throw the current edition of the Knicks off that Chase Bridge and said, “Hopefully (the Knicks) can rebound this summer and put some pieces together and get back to winning basketball games.”
Maybe they can. No one is suggesting that Jackson can’t do this, in the summer before he turns 70, after the longest winter of his life in all ways. It is just that there is no evidence, off the hiring of Fisher, and the way he gave away Tyson Chandler and J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert — whatever you thought of all of them in their last days with the Knicks — that he can. It seems like 10 years ago that Spike Lee was giving us that tutorial documentary on the triangle offense, as if it was going to do everything in the city except get the Second Avenue subway up and running.
“It’s not just an offense,” Spike said at the time, “it’s a way of life.”
Losing is a way of life for Knicks fans, who thought everything was going to change when Dolan hired Jackson after a whirlwind bromance and the Knicks hit the reset button. Again. A year later, they are prepared to hit the same button, as the real basketball season at the Garden is set to begin with the draft lottery, and then the free-agent signing period.
For now, the Knicks are Jackson, they are Carmelo, they are cap space, they are a lottery pick. People talk about Marc Gasol the way they used to talk about LeBron, and the way they talked about Kevin Durant. Only Durant goes away for four to six months because of an injured foot and so maybe he doesn’t even get the chance to be the latest pie-in-the-sky star who is going to come to the Garden and change everything. Or maybe we should be talking about pies to the face.
People never booed this team, not really, the Knicks aren’t a professional basketball team, how do you boo them for that? All we know about what has happened over the last year or so is that Jackson got paid, Fisher got paid, Carmelo got paid. And Knicks fans kept paying good money to James Dolan to come to the Garden. And somehow the value of the Knicks just keeps increasing. Is this a great country or what?