Thibs has to avoid the ghosts of Knicks’ past
Too early to write them off, but they need to get it going soon
It is far too soon to write off the Knicks as a bottom-of-theseedings mediocrity, not with so much season left to be played — if positive tests allow them and the rest of the NBA to play it, that is.
There is, hopefully, still a 50game season to be played, one that started Saturday against the Hawks. They absolutely have been injured so far. They have been virus-ed and protocol-ed. The coach, Tom Thibodeau, who began this season as the legit biggest sports guy in town, and by a lot, has also Kemba-ed them, with his ham-handed decision to not just bench Kemba Walker when the team was 11-9, but bury an immensely popular New York City basketball figure, all the way back to Rice High School, at the end of his bench like he was a scrub.
But we have seen enough so far to worry that this is an old movie line, and a pretty famous one, to
in a pretty famous
Jack Nicholson
movie once:
“It’s Chinatown, Jake.” There have been enough warning signs from a team that ended up 10 games over .500 and came into its Christmas Day game four games under .500, to make you think, well, it’s the Knicks, Jake.
And to worry that last season, and the way the Knicks came back and the Garden came back and the team made this loud, happy-making ride all the way to the No. 4 spot in the Eastern Conference seedings might have over-performed and that what we have seen so far is some sort of market correction, for them and for the rest of the conference.
Last year wasn’t just a surprise. It was just pure, big fun. This season has been the opposite of that. This was one of the things I heard Tom Thibodeau say after the Wizards made 3-pointers from everywhere except the Farley Building in the fourth quarter and dropped the Knicks’ record at home to 6-11.
“When you’re shorthanded like we are right now, we can’t afford not to play with great intensity on every possession,” Thibodeau said. “So that’s where we are.”
“Where we are,” at that particular moment was 12th in the conference, and a game closer to the Pistons in last place than to the Nets in first. But if you have been watching the Knicks lately, it is hard to pin this all on effort, which is what we so often hear from coaches when their team is under-performing, especially after the way it really might have over-performed a year ago as it was lifting the collective spirit of a passionate fan base, a fan base that had largely been beaten down for the past 20 years.
There are always reasons in sports, and then there are excuses. Derrick Rose’s ankle injury is a reason why the Knicks are where they are. So are positive tests. But COVID and omicron can’t be used as an excuse because, well, just look at the Nets, and the rest of the league, and the rest of the sports world right now, and that means around the world.
Start here, though: The idea that somehow Kemba Walker’s defense was responsible for the Knicks’ win-one, lose-one start over the first 20 games happens to be ridiculous, and makes you think that Thibodeau didn’t want him on his basketball team in the first place. The move to DNP Kemba Walker coincided with a lot of bad stuff. The fact remains, though, that the Knicks proceeded to win two of their next nine games with Kemba as much of a spectator as Spike.
Thibodeau has a perfect right to take Walker out of his starting lineup if he wants to. You hear “Thibs likes big, athletic guards” so much these days you think it should have been the trigger for a Christmas drinking game. But to do it the way he did it, in the extreme, looked petty and almost hostile. As if Thibodeau were suddenly acting out because Leon Rose didn’t get him Gordon Hayward or somebody else he liked better than Kemba during the offseason.
It clearly shouldn’t matter to Thibodeau what the rest of the league thinks about treating Kemba this way. The fact remains, however, that the rest of the league has taken notice of his shabby treatment. “They was really giving Kemba DNPs,” CJ McCollum of the Trail Blazers tweeted on Thursday night, and then rooted for Kemba to put 50 on the Wizards even though he only made it to 44.
No one is suggesting that Kemba is the player he used to be. A smart follower of the league I know said to me on Friday morning, “Two solid franchises — Boston and OKC — essentially gave him away.” All true. It doesn’t
change the fact that treating him this way, and doing it in New York, looks like the opposite of team building for a coach who got his team to play for him the way it did last season.
These two things can both be true: Tom Thibodeau did the best coaching job in the NBA last season. And Tom Thibodeau isn’t doing close to his best work so far this season, even with all the players he has had go down for various reasons. And while the partnership of Leon Rose and William Wesley also was a big part of the Knicks story one year ago, as they didn’t just restore order to Dolan’s Garden but also gave it street cred, their team doesn’t seem to have gotten better. It has, for now, gotten worse. They provided Thibodeau with Evan Fournier, who has been a huge disappointment to this point and apparently provided him with another guard, Kemba, that Thibodeau clearly did not want.
On top of all that, Julius Randle, a player I thought was as valuable to the Knicks last season as much bigger stars were to much better teams around the league, is not playing at that level through the first 30 or so games.
Of course, all it takes is one big win, and then another, and soon enough the Knicks are almost back to .500, and ready to make a move into the New Year. Rose and Wesley and Thibodeau and Randle and the other Rose, Derrick, looked so good, and we were carried along by the roar of the Garden, when it all seemed to go right last season, especially across the second half of the season and until they ran into Trae Young in the first round of the playoffs. So it is their job to figure it out now, and somehow figure out a way to make this a two-team city across that 50-game season that started on Christmas Day.
No one is suggesting that the Knicks are about to revert to the bad, old days. Still: Things haven’t looked good lately. And at least it scared their fans into thinking they might be the “Chinatown” Knicks.