Knicks in Six

Way back when, a nice reporter from the Times got me on the blower. The paper wanted to figure out why I and a bunch of other folks were frittering away our scant time on this planet by blogging about not just a garden-variety bad team, but a laughingstock, with punchlines spat out on the regular by a godawful roster, the self-sabotaging incompetence of the front office, or even the humiliating and often downright weird scandals. 

But what if, by some dint of luck or divine intervention, the Knicks somehow managed to right this leaky, rotting ship? My answer was that, for one, I didn’t know if I could psychically handle such a thing. It would be entirely foreign to my entire experience of fandom. 

Moreover, I said, writing about the gorgeous brand of ball that, say, the San Antonio Spurs were playing seemed like gilding the lily.  How many time could you praise the tiki-taka passes flitting around the court, Manu’s flights of fancy, or the unstoppable, economial efficiency of a Tim Duncan. The product was right there in front of your eyes, so simple and clear, a child could understand it. Blog it? Nah. Just enjoy it. 

The wretched Knicks, on the other hand, required a sharp interlocutor (i.e. a Sadboy Blogger) to truly break it down into its constitutive—and shitty—parts. Maybe connect it to the enshittification of the larger world, even, or dabble in some light romanticizing of our collective suffering. It was a way to make sense of the nonsensical, and maybe find common ground with other people who were equally baffled and yet couldn’t make a nice clean break with this team. Maybe you too think that’s a noble pursuit. I certainly did at the time.

While the Times story didn’t state it outright, it’s not hard to suss out the implication that maybe continuing not just to root for the Knicks, but to obsessively chronicle every catastrophe is akin to consciously choosing pointless, seemingly endless misery for no good reason whatsoever. And what kind of sucker would do that?

But here now come this year’s Knickerbockers, who, to my eternal shock, have ascended to something resembling—if not exceeding—that basketball nirvana. They’re honking great, full stop. They’re playing in the NBA Finals. 

Let me repeat that a few times out loud. Maybe it’ll feel true. The freaking New York Knicks are four wins away from wrapping their oversize mitts around the ultimate hoops brass ring. It’s right there for the taking. Moreover, they’re not just winning, but playing some of the most beautiful ball seen since Frazier et al. were running around in short shorts.

I’ve lost track how many times I’ve muttered to myself, it’s not real. It can’t be real. The results are there, plain as day for all to see, but still. I can’t wrap my head around it. Can you?

***

My mom suffered a freak leg injury two months ago. She slipped and fell and shattered her tibia and fibula like so many dried spaghetti strands. It required a dicey surgical procedure—even for someone who wasn’t 87 years old and beset by the kind of comorbidities that’d clog the puppet-packed toy door that was Montgomery Burns’ health profile. Meaning: a long-ass and painful rehab, assuming she made it through the surgery.

You know that old saw about foxholes and atheists. Like a lot of cliches, if you get past the glib, cringeworthy exterior, it’s not long before you land in a gooey center of fucking profound truth. I prayed, is what I’m saying. 

I’ve pinged between something like atheism and agnosticism for the entirety of my life, but once the fit hit the shan, none of that mattered. I really prayed. Or tried to pray. I asked friends to pray. I got fucking teary when people told me they were praying. The thing about hospitals you learn right quick is that no matter how skilled and devoted the nurses and doctors might be, they’re all being stretched thin as gossamer, and shit falls between the cracks. Don’t look up how many deaths in hospitals are the result of medical errors. It’ll scare the bejeezus out of you. 

She did it. She pulled through. And then the real work began.  The subacute rehabilitation facility isn’t great. None of them are. Unless you’ve got oligarch-grade cash lying around to pay for 24/7 private care. So the only way to really make the rehab manageable for my mom—let alone to prevent a mortal fuckup—is to do some homebrewed nursing yourself. 

This has been my life for the past two months. Every day, I trundle down to this grim-looking facility, sit by her side, and do what’s needed. I try to distract her or at least stick a knife in the boredom. I fix ill-applied bandages to wounds. I prepare backup meals and tote them with me, for when the institutional grub isn’t up to snuff. (It’s as bad as the hack jokes suggest.) I wrangle hospital administrators, and watch her suffer. I find TV shows she can binge watch. Like spinning plates, every time one symptom is treated, it sends another teetering on the edge. I use ChatGPT to look up the side effects of various meds—and before you yell at me, LLMs are very effective at parsing medical info. Someone even sent me a bespoke agent that a real-life doctor cobbled together. It’s been a godsend. I spy on the woman down the hall who sounds exactly like Betty Boop if Betty Boop had been possessed by the demon in The Exorcism. She shouts racial slurs at the staffers or bellows—constantly!— that the doctors “wanna kill every schmuck in this joint. They’re tryna kill us all!” At various points, she’s called me “a skinny-assed motherfucker” and a “four-eyed freak.” 

Then I go home.

***

I watched pretty much the entire 11-0 Knicks run on a tiny phone screen by my mom’s side. Even with a sub-ideal portal, my god… the fucking sheer poetry. 

The most dominant playoff stretch—hell, regular season stretch!—in NBA history. A plus-261 point differential. The 30-plus-point blowouts, and the 60 point lead at some point when they eviscerated and disembowel the Hawks. The gritty 4th quarter comeback against the Cavs, including a shot that pinged off every spot on the circumference of the rim from Shamet, who was 11 for 12 from three in the series (lol). They literally gave us a gritty reboot of their own galling collapse against the Pacers last year. Who could have predicted this? 

(Editor’s note: Kevin McElroy did, that’s who. In our Old-Ass Ex-Knicks Bloggers Group Chat, he’s sworn all year that this team was definitely going to make the Finals and had a puncher’s chance of winning it all. He never wavered, either, not even during the 2-9 midseason nadir. Kudos, man—and more on this in a sec.)

These Knicks have become a shape-shifting behemoth and gone on a generational sports heater. Unlike, say, two months ago, their success isn’t predicated on Brunson grimly running the same high pick and roll, picking out a ripe subpar defender, and then running through and endless series of feints, jabs, and hesitation dribbles before nailing an improbable off-balance floater. 

Don’t get me wrong, that shit still works! But this year’s Knicks model has sprouted wings. They spend a quarter or two figuring out an opponent’s weak spot and then pounce on it like a swarm of piranhas, targeting the tender bits and exploiting every advantage to the fullest, no matter how small. And they don’t let up till their quarry has been felled and lying in a pool of their own blood. 

You could see it in the Cavs/Sixers/Hawks’ eyes. By the clincher, they’d plumb given up. 

They’re able to smack the ever-loving crap out of opponents because all the issues plaguing the starting five—the ones we’ve spent two years griping about—have magically washed away. 

KAT has transformed into his version of Bill Walton: a devastating high post passing hub and totally cromulent rim protector. Mikal Bridges rediscovering that yes, actually, you can drive the ball all the way to the rim and even absorb a scintilla of contact without turning into dust. Josh Hart learning how to deal with being ignored on offense by setting killer screens and cutting his way into gobs of open space. OG’s bursts of on-ball creation are the norm now, including a few Kawhi-like midrange buckets. 

There’s really nothing more gratifying than seeing a team figure it out. The full story of how and why these oddball parts finally snapped perfectly into place will have to wait. But their newfound powers are entirely rooted in something like self-awareness, and the realization that everything they want to be can only be achieved together. If that means ditching a few personal benchmarks, so be it. True unselfishness. You watch them play, and it feels like a celebration of life itself. Does any of that seem remotely plausible to you? 

So yeah, when I say that I’ve stumbled through the last nine days in a haze, it’s partly because of, you know, LIFE STUFF, and partly because none of this makes any sense. It shouldn’t be happening. Not to a franchise that’s still run by a paranoid, creepy nepo baby. 

Full disclosure: I’m one of the main doomers in our group chat. It’s second nature, really. Hoping for the best, then being 110 percent convinced that no matter what, we’ll get hit with a brick shithammer. 

But somewhere on the way, maybe while staring at my phone under dull, fluorescent hospital lights, I had something like a flash of insight. Maybe, just maybe, it’s a lot better to spend the brief time we have on this planet investing in hope rather than wallowing in doomer misery—no matter how many good blogs come from that mindset. 

It’s not a lesson I’m going to take entirely to heart. That’s eminently clear. But when it comes to something as utterly inconsequential as sports, why not be bold. Tell the losers we’re going to stomp their asses and then celebrate accordingly when they pull it off, Timothée Chalamet-style. Because it doesn’t matter what you or I or any fan thinks and feels. The final buzzer will sound no matter what. 

Why not enjoy it while we can?

Anyway: Knicks in six.