Believe in Knicks? Not without proof Until there’s real progress, everything is just Garden spin
There is no other bad team in the history of New York sports that has generated so much interest and so much noise so consistently as the Knicks. And there is no operation in New York sports that obsesses more about how it is covered, especially when more high-profile and bigticket free agents don’t want the Knicks money, and absolutely do want to go play basketball somewhere besides Madison Square Garden.
Oh, sure. It reached the point by the middle of the week, when the Knicks wanted it out there that there was no point in them even meeting with Kawhi Leonard, that I was waiting to hear the Knicks would have passed on Michael Jordan if he’d decided to return to North Carolina for his senior year. This, of course, a few days after Knick fans were told there was a shiny-object chance that Kawhi and Kevin Durant were coming to the Garden as a package deal.
It called to mind one of my favorite lines from Ron Darling, a proud Mets 86’er who had a lot of great lines to choose from. Ron was talking one day about the constant back-page drama with the Mets of the ’80s:
“We spend an amazing amount of time around here worrying about things that have nothing to do with winning the game.”
And Darling played on a team that won a ton of games,
including 116 in ’86 when they won it all and became one of the best baseball shows in the history of the city. One of the reasons was that they were assembled, brilliantly, by a great baseball man named Frank Cashen, and lieutenants named Joe McIlvaine and Al Harazin.
Now the Knicks’ front office is two men: Steve Mills and Scott Perry. Mills and Perry are now selling a longterm plan built around kids and veterans on short-term contracts. But what else are they going to sell now that the latest short-term plan (to use cap space they partially cleared by giving away Kristaps Porzingis to the Mavericks) has been shot out of a cannon?
Durant was the shiny object for months around here, at least when Zion wasn’t. Back in the spring you got the idea that all the Knicks were waiting for was Durant’s signature on the last day of June. Then Kyrie seemed locked into the Nets, and the partnership of Kawhi-Kevin became a shiny object until Kevin-Kyrie Irving officially became a new partnership in Brooklyn.
Now the new shiny object is Giannis Antetokounmpo, who is supposed to be in play in the summer of 2021. The goalposts have been moved back to the warmup tunnel on Knick fans.
These fans are asked to trust Mills, almost as much a part of the permanent basketball government at Madison Square Garden as James L. Dolan is, and Perry, whose biggest front-office responsibilities in the NBA before he got to the Knicks were with the Orlando Magic and the Sacramento Kings. You’re supposed to believe that Joe Dumars didn’t make a move without Perry when they were both with the Pistons.
Knicks fans are supposed to put their faith in the partnership of Mills and Perry even more than they’re sup