BRING IT ON!
After a rough last 10 years, let’s hope New York sports are better in next decade
There is some debate about when decades actually end, whether the one we’re in now ends when the ball drops on this New Year’s Eve in Times Square, or the next one. But we’re going to go ahead and officially start the ’20s in New York sports as soon as possible. Because the decade that is ending now for our sports teams, before the next one begins with Kevin Durant and Gerrit Cole in it has been a lot smaller than we wanted it to be in the big, bad city, which hasn’t been the sports capital of the world for a while. Which hasn’t mattered the way it once did in sports.
Oh, we had our moments over the past ten years. We sure did. The Giants won another Super Bowl and the Mets made it back to the World Series for the first time since the Subway Series of 2000. The Jets went to a second consecutive AFC championship game. The Rangers tried made it back to the Stanley Cup final for the first time in 20 years. The Knicks even won an Atlantic Division title, and their first playoff game since the spring of 2000. The Nets won a playoff series, the only one they got in the last decade, in 2014 and got themselves a second-round series against LeBron and the Heat.
The Yankees kept winning and winning, of course. They’ve played three American League Championship Series over the past decade. They won 103 games last season. But everybody knows that’s not how they measure real winning on 161st St. The Yankees have now won one Series since 2000. And despite the fact that they never have a losing season, that they have a remarkable record of winning seasons going back to the ’90s, even their own fans think that they’ve gotten off to a slow century. Especially as they’ve watched the Red Sox win four World Series since 2004, in the same sports century during which Bill Belichick’s Patriots have won six Super Bowls.
And when the Red Sox did win another World Series in 2018, we all had to listen as they sang “New York, New York,” in response to Aaron
Judge playing the song on his boom box after Game 2 of the Yankees-Red Sox division series a few weeks before, walking through Fenway Park to the bus after the Yankees had evened the series. The Yankees never got another game off the Sox. The Sox got another Duck Boat parade. Quack, quack.
But maybe things really are about to change with New York sports, in a big way. The Nets did sign Kevin Durant, one of the biggest free agents out there after last season along with Kawhi Leonard. They did sign Kyrie Irving. Now the Yankees have given Cole the biggest contract for a starting pitcher in the history of baseball. Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman didn’t do it because they’re looking to beat the Red Sox. They did it because they want to beat everybody again.
The Knicks can’t beat anybody. They haven’t made the playoffs since they did win that one series. The Jets haven’t made the playoffs since that last AFC title game against the Steelers in Heinz Field. The wonderful seven-game series that the Nets got off the Raptors before they lost in five games to the LeBrons in May of ’14. The Rangers actually won more playoff rounds than any team in town over the last decade, not only making the final in ’14 but losing a heartbreak seven-game conference final to Tampa Bay the next year. But they’ve been out of the playoffs the past two years.
And you know the real bottom line with them, and the Knicks, and the Garden: The Rangers have been in business since 1927. The Knicks have been in business since 1946. In all that time, the two Garden teams have combined for a total of six titles. Since the Knicks won their second and last NBA title in 1973, the two
Garden teams have combined for one championship in basketball and hockey.
The Giants? They provided us the great moment in New York sports, for any of the teams, in February of 2012 in Indianapolis. Not only did they get another Super Bowl off Belichick and Tom Brady and the Patriots, Eli Manning and Mario Manningham gave us one of the unforgettable plays in all the history of New York sports, Eli throwing that ball from the shadow of the goal posts to Manningham down the left sideline for 38-yards. The pass that David Tyree pinned to his helmet the first time the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl — and kept the Patriots from being 19-0 — was pure luck. This one was pure genius. The Giants had gotten the ball at their 12 with just under four minutes left, down 17-14. Because of the pass to Manningham, they went 88 yards and got the lead and won the game.
Those were the days.
Now Eli is on his way out, No. 10 making throws against the Dolphins so the Giants didn’t lose 10 in a row. But he does that before Cole officially hits town. Kevin Durant will be back next season. Maybe Darnold and Daniel Jones can do for their teams in the next decade what Namath and Simms and Eli (and even Jeff Hostetler) did for theirs. Or Pete Alonso and Jacob deGrom can win the the Mets their first Series since ’86.
Maybe, just maybe, the ’20s can be the Roaring ’20s in New York sports. And there can be more than the one parade through the Canyon of Heroes we got over the last ten years. And king of the hill, top of the heap, can be more than a song lyric. In Brooklyn the rallying cry used to be wait ‘till next year. Now it’s wait ‘till the next ten, all over town.