Knicks Morning News (2025.08.22)

From Fischer:

The Knicks, meanwhile, have three open roster spaces and have been mentioned as a possible home for Ben Simmons or Brogdon as well as Landry Shamet.

Yet New York has also been cited as a team that could pursue Malik Beasley after ESPN reported Friday that Beasley is no longer the target of a federal gambling investigation. I’m told that the Knicks have maintained a level of interest in Beasley since the teams met in the first round of the playoffs in May and now the sharpshooter appears poised to become an unexpected late-summer free agent of note after the launch of the investigation just as free agency was about to commence led Detroit to scrap its plans to sign him to a new three-year, $42 million deal.

Would be great, but hard to imagine him taking a vet-min from us for an unclear role over $7.2M from Detroit. A handful of other teams can actually beat Detroit’s offer with MLE and/or cap space money too.

I understand this will elicit some eye rolls from those more senior than me, but hitting 30 was definitely a cause for some reflection.

I’m very satisfied with where I am in my personal life and career, so there was no existential crisis. But there was a low-grade identity crisis of sorts for a simple reason—for most of my life I’ve found myself in spaces where for some reason or another my relative youth stood out.

I frequented analytics-focused MLB forums as a middle schooler, did some political activism, volunteering, and general discourse in high school, coached youth basketball in college (while continuing the political stuff), and found myself in front of a classroom of middle schoolers at 22. At each stop I was pretty much always the youngest person around, often by 10+ years.

So, for a lot of my life I’ve been, for lack of a better term, the wiz kid. It would be both objectively incorrect and cringey for me to try to cling to that mantle at 30. Sure, most of my fellow attorneys are still older than me (and make sure to let me know it), but at the end of the day I’m a grown ass adult held to the standards of a grown ass adult. As it should be.

Coming to peace with this took some time, but in an era where I think too many people are making quite frankly pathetic attempts to cling to their youth, there’s a lot to be said for embracing adulthood and the standards of behavior and performance that come with it. It’s actually somewhat freeing to know I’m now solely judged based on the quality of my output—the “that’s so impressive for his age” curve has come and gone. It’s not healthy for one’s identity to be tied up in their youth because, well, it’s one of the most fleeting things there is, definitionally.

Plus I now have some disposable income, so if I want to skimp on groceries for a few weeks to go to MSG, no one can veto that except arguably my girlfriend, who still mostly finds the hobby endearing (we’ll see how long that lasts, she did say the aftermath of game 1 of the ECFs was the most devastated she had ever seen me).