We’re Back

Hello again, friends. How long has it been? No, really. I’m asking. 

For all you yougins’, in the first part of the 2010s, Knickerblogger was the spot where Jim Cavan, Kevin McElroy, and I poured out many hundreds of thousands of words during this godawful, rancid clown car of team that we loved—and still love—with all our hearts. I tried parsing the Knickerblogger archives to exhume our last few desperate posts, partly for old times’ sake, and partly to pin down the exact date of our final appearances. But apparently all of our pre-2015 blogs were sacrificed to the bottomless maw of Online, and we haggard sporps bloggers haunt the joint, our names only vaguely recalled, if at all.

To be clear, I haven’t been locked deep in the bowels of a Turkish prison, as one commenter surmised. (That was Jim.) 

But it was a real hoot, pondering the potential of Toure’ Murry and others of his ilk; banging out gamers in the wee small hours, like my 5,000-odd word knockoff of Beckett’s The Unnamable following a galling defeat by the Robert Sacre-era Lakers; or dabbling in, say, man-on-the-street interview humor. And hey, we even wrote a gotdang book, man: “We’ll Always Have Linsanity: Strange Takes on the Strangest Season in Knicks History.” For years, like clockwork, we’d all receive a handful of pennies in residuals. That is, until the tiny publishing house went belly up. 

But Knickerblogger is where I learned how to write, and convinced myself that I could do this for a living.

It was a place—and more importantly, a time in digital media—where you could experiment, work out very weird and wrong ideas, and even mess up. Failure, after all, really is the best damned teacher. And it’s through all that typing, typing, typing that a really important lesson wormed its way into my skull: For as much fun as I was having, the point of writing shit down is share it—to put a thing out in the world and make, if only for a moment, a kind of connection. tl;dr, it’s not about me; it’s about you.

Best-case scenario, maybe, those moments of identification and connection means we can form a community. It’s honestly a kind of miracle that this website exists at all, but all credit goes to Mike Kurylo and you readers, devout Knickerbloggeristas everywhere. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

And now that the team we all dreamed about—and were dead sure would never come to be—is finally here and inches away from grabbing that oh-so elusive brass ring? Well, shit. I gotta blog this, and I certainly have to have my eccentric-but-loveable, ragtag experts and specialists along with me for One Last Job.

If not now, when? Especially since, as noted Knicks fan/author David Grann recently put it, “The world is shit, but the Knicks are great.”

So we’ll be blogging from now till whenever this blessed Knicks run comes to an end. There will be recaps and analysis, raging at the dying of the light, and probably a smattering of infantile humor. We were trying to hammer out some kind of schedule, or at least divvy up what beats we’d be covering, but that drive petered out pretty quickly. Besides, we were better at winging it, or running a read-and-react motion offense, if you want to be generous. As Kevin reminded us in our group chat, “I’m sorry did we ever write ABOUT things?”

Without further ado…

Kevin McElroy

Hello, friends. It’s been far too long. Life happened, and the Knicks kept happening. I got married, got a graduate degree, bought a house, had two kids. And the Knicks just kept happening. We never got to talk about it, unless we found each other on X dot com formerly Twitter and then even that party got blown up. What to say, then, in this, the “new phone, who dis?” of basketball blog posts?

So much of the time we spent together here had the flavor of collective delusion. And, genuinely, I’m great with it. We needed it. We came together and squinted until we saw the thing we needed to see, the Knicks as they could one day be if the sporadic good nights could be the norm, if the draft picks could hit, if the kids could develop, if the vets could get on board, if the front office could stick to a plan. It was a futile hope, and we knew it, but it was a hope that kept the torch lit for one more year, then another. We squinted by that torchlight, then squinted even harder, until we saw a possible future. 

Our eyes are wide open now. These are the good old days. 

Some time in the early days of our collective screen-induced brainrot, I started naming each of my Apple devices after someone I liked on the Knicks when I bought it. Accordingly, my “Find My” app now tells a story of broken dreams, occasionally subterranean standards, and (finally) hope: 

Melo. Chauncey. Jeremy. Langston. Kristaps. Immanuel. Jalen. 

My point is this: this isn’t the time for false modesty. The road has been too long and arduous for that. Take it from the guy who once named a fucking iPad after Langston Galloway. 

And yes, Wemby’s a basketball Sasquatch and, yes, there are plenty of other players on the Spurs that can step up and beat us. This sure as shit is NOT the Cavs. 

No matter. Feel the pride you had to fake for so long. Let your hope stand as tall as your doubts, and then taller still. Believe in what you’ve seen the last few weeks.  The Knicks, modest underdogs though they may rightly be in these Finals, are absolutely capable of beating this team four times. 

I’m so, so excited for the next few weeks. 

Let’s have some fun here.

Jim Cavan

Hi! I’m Jim Cavan. You might remember me from such cogent Knicks analysis as “Let’s Grade Every Player for This February Game Against the Bobcats Using Made-Up Bible Quotes,” and “Landry Fields: The Next Bill Bradley?”

Economic disaster. The unquestioned embrace of a dystopian surveillance state. Senseless conflicts. Cartoonish corruption. The beautiful colors we once proudly saluted sullied by years of global embarrassment. This terrifyingly unpredictable and sociopathic trust-fund narcissist presiding over it all.

The Knicks have done some SHIT, guys! 

Having to deal with *gestures helplessly in all directions* on top of all that? Whoo boy…

For far too long, the respite this team was supposed to offer from the hells and horrors of tHE rEAL wOrLd became the force from which we *most* needed to escape—like being jarred awake from a two-daiquiri nap on a Caribbean beach by the roar of a towering tidal wave and having to sprint barefoot for the fifth floor of a nearby office building, feet soles shredded from the endeavor. 

And then they signed him—and everything changed. The prince that was promised. 

Theo Pinson, wherever you now lay your weary head: This is for you.

Anyway, stay tuned for more tortured metaphors and unresolved basketball traumas in the days and weeks ahead!

It’s truly an honor to share this experience—however it ends, no matter our individual journeys or coping mechanisms, whatever fluids we discharge—with a community that has meant so goddam much to so many. One that so deeply deserves the joyously gorgeous basketball we’re blessed to witness, and the glory we all hope that beauty will finally deliver.

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