The New York Knicks: A Shakespearean Tragedy

Watching the Knicks play basketball is painful. It’s like watching the D’Antoni Suns without all the good players…which means it’s like stabbing yourself in the eye with rusty, disease-ridden scissors: you’re immediately pained by sharp things being in your eye and you’re in a world of trouble later when you develop cancer or something.

The Knicks live and die by the three. They take three-pointers almost as often as everything else, and they miss about 70% of the time. Under D’Antoni, they’re doing a great job of passing the ball, but it’s ugly to see four quick passes in rapid succession (that’s double quick!) and then see Richardson, Crawford, or Robinson lob a bomb that inevitably bounces off the front of the rim into the prepared hands of an opposing frontcourt player. And that’s the best part: opposing big men know that the bucket is going to rim out or whatever and so they’re uber prepared to get the board, but the Knicks frontcourt? Clueless. They think it’s going in every time and so they’re out of sight before the ball is halfway to the hoop. If they just accepted that it’s going to bounce off way more than half the time, they could have a number of offensive rebounds and good, solid putbacks. Instead, they’re left with an empty possession and a fast hustle up the court to the other basket because of a fast-break opportunity. That’s painful to watch.

And all of the players on this roster seem ill-suited for, um, basketball. Or rather, they seem ill-suited for basketball that requires a team effort. They seem more prepared for street ball in Philadelphia than professional ball in New York Fuckin’ New York. Sure, I just said they pass the ball well, but that doesn’t mean they play team basketball. That just means the ball is moving hands. What happens is the ball moves hands, a lot, and then someone eventually decides it’s up to them to take the shot. So you’ll see the ball go from Robinson to Randolph to Crawford back to Randolph for the turn around jumper off the double team. Or sometimes you’ll see this weird circular passing thing that happens where the ball will go all the way around the perimeter and back until someone takes the misaligned three pointer (missing it, of course). Duhon will run up the court, stop at the top of the key, throw the ball to Crawford in the corner, who will immediately throw it back to Duhon (which the defense NEVER saw coming, right?), who will fake throwing it back to Crawford and instead “surprise” everyone by throwing it to Richardson in the other corner, who was open earlier, but not anymore, and still fires the three anyway.

What it comes down to is this half-hearted effort to take in D’Antoni’s system. They pass the ball well, but they still think that everyone on the team sucks and so each person will take it upon himself (or herself, in the case of Randolph [it’s the manboobs]) to drive ineptly to the basket or pull up short and take the jumper (because they see Kobe do it every night). The only difference is that Kobe is ridic (or Jordan, or Iverson, or Melo, or Wade, and occasionally James [at the pull up jumper specifically]).

Here’s an example that just happened: the ball movement was good, and eventually it came around to Malik Rose on the wing. Rose, in typical fashion, decided that if everyone was just going to pass it, he was going to take it to the rim (muttering “silly bitches” under his breath, for sure). So he dribble fakes, drives to the rim, gets by his defender surprisingly, and just past the rim he tries to do a reverse layup in the manner of Dwayne Wade. Unfortunately, his hand didn’t get high enough and before he could even release the ball, it hit the bottom of the rim (clunnnnggg!). Rose got fouled and so he had a chance for mini-redemption, but it didn’t matter; the damage was done.

What seems apparent with the Knicks is an influx of ego. Every player was recruited by Isiah Thomas in the past and given a bigger salary than they were worth, and immersed in an environment of me-first living, which automatically translated to the basketball court. All of the scandals and turmoil surrounding the organization over the past few years helped mold the players into solid egoistic basketball playing both because everyone else was doing it and because it was probably safer to think about your own neck in such a hotbed of shit and frustration. If you made better stats than the next guy, you had a higher probability of staying on when the inevitable roster implosion occurred. So D’Antoni has to work against this mountain he inherited, work against the entrenched psychological mindsets of his entire roster. They are confronted with something entirely new and in contrast with Isiah-ball and they’re not sure if they should open themselves up to it. They think it’s still safer, for the first year, at least, to play egoistically so when the real roster implosion occurs, they’re not cut.

Paychecks are paychecks and after a tenure inside Madison Square Garden, it’s unlikely other teams are going to pick you up before March. Anyone want aging, overweight frontcourt players? Randolph and Curry. Wild, shoot-first point guard with no respect for team games? Marbury. Awful, me-first ball players with little use for fundamentals? Robinson, Richardson, Crawford, Rose, blah blah blah the whole damn team