Colin Sheridan: The New York Knicks - poster boys for doing it wrong - have gone sensible. Almost
GETTING THE KNACK? New York Knicks owner James Dolan: Finally the franchise looks set to make the NBA play-offs - and perhaps somewhere the game’s elite players would consider a good career move instead of a dead-end. Picture: Tim Clayton, Getty Images
London is satisfied, Paris is resigned, but New York is always hopeful”
— Dorothy Parker
As it often is, the cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine is a thing of simplistic beauty. Five basketball players, three bearded and in Brooklyn Nets black, and two more chasing in the storied blue and orange of the New York Knickerbockers. The players will be recognisable to fans of the game, but the image and its message will resonate with everybody who has ever visited the city: “Hoop Dreams in New York’’.
After two decades of sucking, the city is good at basketball again.
When the Brooklyn Nets, heretofore poor relation of the super stud Knicks, acquired a trio of superstars in Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Kyrie Irving, they automatically became prohibitive favourites to dethrone the struggling LA Lakers, who are stumbling toward the end of the regular season like a tired drunk, hoping their twin towers LeBron James and Anthony Davis, remain free from the injuries that have blighted their season.
The Nets possess arguably the most talented offence assembled in the history of the league. It’s the equivalent of having Brian Fenton, Michael Murphy and David Clifford on a five-man Gaelic football team, but even that is no guarantee for success.
Durant, a colossus of a player who has battled back from a career-threatening achilles injury only to see his season disrupted by successive calf injuries, as well as needless off court distractions (an unsavoury spat with actor/comedian Michael Rappaport brought all the wrong headlines on a player renowned for his proclivity for “engaging” with his critics).
Irving is perhaps one of the most gifted handlers of a basketball the game has ever seen, an alchemist with an assassin’s eye, he too has a personality so eclectic it would fill an entire edition of the New Yorker by itself. Famed for trolling the media, Irving went missing in action this season for seven games, for reasons that were never fully explained (the inference was “family reasons”, the evidence that Irving was partying with family and friends during his hiatus may have been unproven, but, critically, also unchallenged).
Irving has been good this year, but it’s been the last piece of this very expensive puzzle that has proven most prolific; James Harden won universal disapproval for forcing a trade from Houston during the past offseason. Inspired by the haters, he has been Brooklyn’s best player. Whether it’s enough to guarantee success for a project that has no tomorrow, only today, remains to be seen.
The Knicks, by contrast, have gone the opposite route. They have started to actually build something, which flies in the face of their famed “get rich, quick!” philosophy which has made them as likeable and logical an idea as the €25m white rafting facility proposed for the middle of Dublin. They have become a metaphor for mismanagement and indulgence. Every corner turned saw them collide into an oncoming locomotive.
Madison Square Garden, once a synonym for entertainment, had come to resemble the set of soap opera so cliche, each passing season became a gaudier version of the last. The team’s owner James Dolan has for a long time made the Glazer family look like a not-for-profit NGO. The only title Dolan can be credited with winning since his stewardship of the Knicks began in 1999 is that of the worst team owner in America, and that’s a league more competitive than the NBA.
Dolan, in overseeing the hiring and firing of 14 head coaches and a solitary playoffs series win in 20 seasons is easily one of the most reviled men in New York public life.
Now, with no overpaid, misfiring superstars, no megalomanic head coaches and no public displays of arseholery from Dolan, the Knicks are good again. Not great, but definitely good. Good enough to make the playoffs. Good enough to win a series, even. Good enough to secure a bone fide star in free agency, something they’ve failed to do in a decade.
Imagine that New York and the Garden was not deemed a legitimate destination for elite players in a league that sees its stars swap teams more regularly than ever before? That players like LeBron, Durant, Irving and Russell Westbrook would one by one turn their nose up at the prospect of building a legacy there is indicative of how the team and its ownership was perceived. Just as the city gentrified, so too the lure of its dollar.
It turns out there literally was not enough money in the world (or James Dolan’s pockets) to tempt them there. That’s how incompetent they had become.
Suddenly, by accident or design, they have hit upon a formula incredibly un-Knicks like in its efficacy. Hiring a good, ambitious coach in Tom Thibodeau was so sensible it seemed suspicious. Enabling talents like power forward Julius Randle and guard RJ Barrett to develop and lead a team that finally has a cast of capable role players to support them has the team resembling more of a hipster start-up than that of a slowly unravelling Wall Street bank.
The acquisition and seamless integration of veteran Derrick Rose, a player with a past complex enough to derail any previous iteration of the Knicks, is a sign that this story is not about just one man, but a team of them. And this team is winning more often than it’s losing.
Just in time, too. As the Manhattan streets begin to feel the footfall of tourists and commuters again, the Knicks have become the likeable underdogs to the Nets galacticos, an ironic reversal of roles for the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn; the former so long the over-indulged star, the latter the likeable underdog, a rare thing for any New York sports team.
As the regular season draws to a close, and the playoffs begin, the pressure will be on The Big Three in Brooklyn. The Knicks can grow and ultimately fail in peace, content they have achieved what few thought possible just two seasons ago; normalcy. A trait you would never associate with the city, but one their fans will gladly accept. As the artist responsible for the New Yorker cover Mark Ulriksen quipped in the issue “any team can have a bad half century”.
Maybe the soap opera is over. Maybe the arthouse movie is about to begin. Either way, you can whisper it; the New York Knicks are good again.
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