All N.Y.’s a stage for KP
The big guy for the Knicks, Kristaps Porzingis, is even bigger right now than Aaron Judge, the biggest guy in town this year. It’s not just because Porzingis has the kind of size advantage he does on All Rise. And Giancarlo Stanton, too, for that matter.
Judge and Stanton won’t officially be in season until they report to Tampa in a couple of months for spring training. With three weeks to go, the pro football season in New York and Jersey is already over; Eli Manning was once the biggest star in town, but now he gets cheered the way he was cheered last Sunday just for showing up. It means that Porzingis is the biggest star we have these days. Until balls start flying out of George Steinbrenner Field like golf balls it feels, more than somewhat, as if he has the stage to himself.
So now we see if he continues to do as much with it at the Garden as he has done so far this season. We see at the same time if he can convince fans at the Garden that he and his team might actually be built to last, so Knicks fans don’t fear the worst every time Porzingis leaves another game early with a sore leg.
To Knicks fans, he has become the most important player since the young Patrick Ewing. And has quickly become more popular than Patrick ever was in the 1980s, just because the truth about the great Patrick Ewing is that he wasn’t fully appreciated here until he was gone, at which point everybody got a good look at what the Knicks looked like without him.
There had been bad times at the Garden, of course, before Ewing got there from Georgetown. There was the night when Marv Albert was famously announcing the starting lineup for a game against the Celtics, the Celtics with Bird and McHale and Parish and the Knicks with Ken Bannister and Bob Thornton matching up against them, when Marv paused and said, “Who chose up these sides?”
But Porzingis comes along at a time when the Knicks have won exactly one playoff series since 2000 – one – and lost as many games as anybody in the league in that time. It is why Porzingis, this quickly and this big, does feel this important, and why Knicks fans root for him as hard as they do, as he tries to do what Pat Ewing did when he finally got with Pat Riley:
Make the Knicks matter again.
Porzingis has the stage to himself in New York and the stage to himself in basketball New York now that Carmelo Anthony, in town with the Thunder on Saturday night as KP sat out with a sore knee, finally plays for somebody else. From the time Phil Jackson took the Latvian kid with the fourth pick in the draft, it was abundantly clear that he wanted New York and the Garden and the stage. And so far this season, we have seen what he’s done with it when healthy: More than 25 points a game and more than six rebounds. This is not to say that this will be anything close to the kind of rising that was built around All Rise Judge during the last baseball season, when the Yankees came as close as they did to the World Series. But what you remember from the way the season ended at Yankee Stadium, when we all left that place after Game 5 of the American League Championship Series feeling as if the Yankees really were going back to the Series after eight years away, was how important it was to Yankee fans that their team mattered again this way; how it was almost a tangible and kinetic thing how much they wanted the Yankees to come back this way. Knicks fans have waited much longer to come back. The last Knicks team that looked like a real title contender was when a wounded Knicks team, with a wounded Ewing still at center, somehow made it to Game 6 of the 2000 Eastern Conference finals against the Pacers. After that – and with the notable exception of the year when Mike Woodson coached them to 54 wins and an Atlantic Division title and Carmelo finished third in the MVP voting – the Knicks have had nearly two decades when the Garden was mostly just a mecca of bad ownership and management and bad basketball.
“Only now,” said Larry Brown, who showed up briefly to coach the Knicks in this era, “they’ve got this kid to love.”
They ask the kid to bring them back, at least to the playoffs this season. They hope for him to stay healthy. He played 72 games as a rookie and played 66 last season. But the thing to remember about him, once you see a 7-3 kid running the court the way he does and shooting the way he does and doing the basketball things he does, is that he doesn’t turn 23 until next August.
It is early for him. Early for the Knicks. He is, let’s face it, being asked to carry an awful lot in just his third year in the league. Nobody is saying he is going to have the kind of year that Judge just had. Nobody would ever compare the history of Judge’s franchise to the history of Porzingis’.
He tries to make the Knicks matter again. It’s why he matters the way he does to his fans. Judge played his way to the skyline this season. Stanton will try to do the same thing next season. Suddenly it is a time for big guys in New York. Right now, this minute, at a time when you imagine him posting up the tree at Rockefeller Plaza, nobody feels bigger than No. 6 of the Knicks.