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ith the Giants and Jets off for the winter and the Rangers marching slowly but steadily toward another appearance in the NHL playoffs, one might think that the back pages of local papers would be hurting for salacious sports stories.
Fortunately for us drama enthusiasts, however, we still have the Knicks.
It’s hard to say exactly where this season went wrong for the Knicks. After all, this was a team that, just a few weeks ago, looked like it might be one of the five best teams in the Eastern Conference. With Kristaps Porzingis emerging as the team’s franchise player, Derrick Rose offering some rare glimpses of his MVP days, and role-players like Kyle O’Quinn or Mindaugus Kuzminskas providing the occasional spark off the bench, the Knicks may not have been contenders for the Larry O’Brien trophy, but they were at least fun to watch.
Since the end of December, however, the Knicks have been fun to watch for a different reason. Starting with a Christmas Day loss to the Celtics, the Knicks have undergone a mid-winter swoon, dropping 11 of their last 13 games. As one might expect, the drought has been marked by some pitiful basketball; lackluster defensive efforts, an inability to close games out late—all marks of a bad team.
But it has been the Knicks’ off-court issues that have really made this latest stretch feel “special.”
You have Knicks’ president Phil Jackson—who has shied away from the public eye since his early-season comments about LeBron James that were tinged with racial insensitivity—sniping at Carmelo Anthony through team-friendly reporters. You have Anthony—whom I have defended in the past—openly musing about waiving his no-trade clause and clearly going out of his way to get ejected from games the Knicks needed to win. Rose went AWOL for a game, flying back to Chicago to visit his family with nary a heads-up to the organization.
I’ll say this about the Knicks: if they’re going to go down in flames, they are going to do it in the biggest way possible. This is New York, after all.
And honestly, if they’re not going to turn their play around, I don’t mind the dysfunction. While I feel bad for head coach Jeff Hornacek, who, at this point, must certainly be rethinking his decision to come to New York, if the Knicks are going to be bad, they had better be entertainingly bad.
If I had my druthers, Carmelo would park himself on the offensive end and refuse to pass half-court until the Knicks finally ship him off to Cleveland; Rose would post random Instagram shots from Las Vegas as the Knicks battle the Pacers in Indiana; and Porzingis would continue to nurse his Achilles injury until someone in the Knicks organization figures out what the heck is going on with this team.
If the Knicks are going to be a laughingstock, they might as well embrace it.
This way, we’ll have something to talk about until the hockey playoffs start in April.
