This squad is exciting but still in search of an identity
NEW YORK — If you’re new to this Knicks season, a word of advice before consuming the next game: Take your time. Do your laundry. Bake a muffin. Scroll Amazon for the deals on turtle wax. Learn Mandarin.
Knicks games don’t mean much until the final five minutes. And maybe that’s being generous. It’s more like the final three minutes. Or two. If Knicks games were a novel, you could flip to the final page and still get an ‘A’ on the book report.
With Tom Thibdoeau’s squad, no lead is safe. Unless it’s against the Pistons. The Knicks have blown a bunch of double-digit leads in the fourth-quarter and lost. They’ve blown a bunch of double-digit leads in the fourth quarter and won.
It’s an exciting and frenetic way to go through a season, and perhaps the next medical study will discover an inordinate amount of Knicks fans seeking anxiety medication. So where has that left the team? It’s seventh in the East, right in the middle of the pack, with a gauntlet of starpower ahead in the standings. The Knicks are probably a playoff team, and probably destined for a first-round elimination.
But you also never know what could happen in a playoff series: in just the last 10 days, the Knicks beat three teams ahead of them in the East, the Cavs, Celtics and Heat.
That’s a very brief stock report about ⅔ into the season, and, frankly, it’s about as good as one would have hoped given the roster’s limitations. We’ve seen much worse at MSG.
And yet, the city has yet to get behind these Knicks. I mean really get behind them. The theory that the Knicks would own New York if they were ever good — which has been backed by evidence during Linsanity and Melo’s best and Kristaps Porzingis’ early rise and the 2021 playoffs — just doesn’t seem to apply with this roster. At least not yet. The Garden atmosphere has been more subdued than previous years, even the lesser seasons. Unless the visiting team brings an attraction like Lebron James, MSG has felt like a bowl of tourists watching a Broadway show after a 5:30 p.m. dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp.
The TV ratings for games on MSG Network have plummeted 22 percent from last season, according to a report. The Knicks had two legitimate All-star candidates — Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle — and neither cracked the top-35 in fan votes across the NBA. The team payroll has been among the lowest in the NBA over the last four seasons, perhaps the best indication that even the front office doesn’t quite believe the roster is ready for your investment of time. The stockpiled future draft picks are a great nugget to include in press releases, but they’re not inspiring much excitement about the current product. Perhaps team president Leon Rose will finally use some of those picks to acquire OG Anunoby from the Raptors before the trade deadline. Or, maybe Rose just trims some excess off the roster by dealing Cam Reddish and Evan Fournier.
In the meantime, Rose will sit on his assets and mismatched roster and wait for opportunity to come knocking.
There are other layers to the apathy. The team has no real identity yet beyond chaotic finishes. They’ve adopted the personality of the coach, a basketball robot. Independent thought is discouraged because it somehow breeds distractions. We don’t know much about these players as people.
There were no press conferences for the two big summer signings, Brunson and RJ Barrett. Rose is about as accessible and understood as a satellite dish in orbit.
This is all to say that you might be missing out. The Knicks are fun on the court. They’re pretty good. They don’t do load management and, a fair warning, they don’t hold leads very well.