Dysfunctional Knicks are back on Broadway
NEW YORK — It was beautiful here once, for a New York minute, in the rare way sports can be truly beautiful.
Jeremy Lin was nobody and then he was somebody, the biggest star in the beating heart of Manhattan. He was nobody and then he strafed the Lakers, beat Toronto at the buzzer, scaled the defending champions from Dallas. Madison Square Garden, so long a poisonous place for basketball, was roaring again, the way only it can. The Knicks were fun again, and they were winning. Beautiful.
It feels like ages ago, now. MSG is a Michael Bay movie again, and the New York press corps already has flecks of blood on its claws identifying the culprits. Head coach Mike D’antoni resigned Wednesday; two of his assistants went with him. The Knicks pushed assistant coach Mike Woodson into the hot seat. Star forward Carmelo Anthony is the obvious villain of the piece; the owner, James Dolan, is another.
The Knicks, in the traditional sense, are back.
“I want to be clear,” Dolan said Wednesday, in his first public comments in five years and two days. “I believe in our players. I believe in our talent. I believe in their commitment to get the team together and to get this right.”
The billionaire son of a billionaire father spoke for a little less than three minutes and walked out of the room without taking questions, with Knicks superfan Spike Lee slouching in the back row in his blue-and-orange mascot’s outfit, looking nonplussed. That Dolan actually had to speak aloud indicated just how quickly, and how thoroughly, the whole thing has come apart.
Jeremy Lin? The AsianAmerican kid from Harvard and California, the guy who was sleeping on his brother’s now-famous couch, the offoff-off Broadway player who was suddenly the best story in sports — well, it feels like it was a daydream, a spec script that died in production. Linsanity, they called it, or something. Yeah, Linsanity. Whatever happened to that?
The obvious answer, of course, is that Anthony happened, and the Knicks happened, and reality came roaring back with a hammer. The Knicks had won seven in a row with Lin unexpectedly playing like an all-star, with Anthony hurt and the team sharing the ball and defending, and then Anthony came back. Going into Wednesday night’s game with Portland — another four-star disaster of a team, if far more quietly — the Knicks had lost six games in a row, and eight of 10. Sure, the schedule got tougher. Sure, several losses were narrow. And yes, Amar’e Stoudemire, a human bird of prey last season, has looked like his uninsurable knees have been paired with an uninsurable heart.
But it was a toxic brew, and Wednesday D’antoni walked into the office of his general manager, former Toronto Raptors GM Glen Grunwald, and said he didn’t think he should keep coaching, and the Knicks agreed. Nba.com’s David Aldridge reported that D’antoni wanted to trade Anthony for Deron Williams; Dolan, it was said, declined. The Wall Street Journal’s Kevin Clark simply reported D’antoni figured it was him or Anthony, who was breaking plays and refusing to partake in D’antoni’s system. Either way, the Knicks were a bonfire of hope, again.
And so they trotted out Woodson, who was never a very interesting coach with Atlanta, aside from the one time he showed up to a game without eyebrows. He sat next to Grunwald, and they both slouched forward a little and spoke in unconvincing tones about how everything might turn out just fine.
“I’ve known Woody a long time,” Grunwald said. “He’s another good coach, another great guy, and I think our team is in good hands.”
In the Knicks locker-room before the game, players came and went, wading wordlessly through the media herd; Lin, who only speaks at the morning shootaround since his sudden stardom, wandered around in flip-flops checking on his ticket allotment. Others flitted about in the labyrinthine areas of MSG where the media is barred by barrelchested security guards.
Anthony was nowhere to be seen.
At the shootaround, before D’antoni quit, Anthony faced the media and lashed out at anonymous sources and mouthed words that didn’t mean anything, including “I’ve been through a lot of adversity in my career. I’ve never run from it and I’m not about to now.” Lin was asked about his relationship with Anthony, and he said Carmelo had been “really nice to me,” and had given him lots of advice, and the two of them were trying to figure out how to best play together. When asked if Anthony should get the ball at the end of close games, Lin said, “It just depends on the game. We don’t know — where is the mismatch, what is their defensive coverage like, things like that.”
When asked what he would change at the pre-game news conference, though, Woodson mentioned getting the ball to Carmelo and Stoudemire. He never said anything about Lin.
And when Anthony was introduced he was booed, though not unanimously, by the home crowd. When he scored, they cheered. When he passed to centre Tyson Chandler for a dunk, they really cheered. Lin came out of the game in the first seven minutes, for Baron Davis. Nothing was particularly magical.
What it all added up to was just another team in disarray, just another star drama in a league that is crammed with them, just another mess in Madison Square Garden. It was ordinary in its extraordinary disarray. And it is easy to forget that less than a month ago everything about Jeremy Lin was being devoured, and Linsanity was a magic so powerful that it created a brush fire of money and television cameras and ink, digital and otherwise. It was easy to forget that every detail of this young man’s life was ground up and cooked and shot directly into the bloodstream of popular culture, the way things are these days. It was easy to forget how preposterous it was, how fresh and invigorating it was, how it felt pure and wondrous.
The Knicks flirted with joy, but that is not the natural order of this place. They call it the city of broken dreams for a reason.