Love & Basketball

What to make of the 2024-25 New York Knicks?

Rewind the tape to a little more than one year ago.

The day was May 19, 2024. The Knicks - what was left of them anyway - had just been eliminated by the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals. It was the furthest New York had made it in the postseason in 24 years, besting 2023 and 2013 by one game, but the run still fell short of the conference finals for the 24th consecutive year.

In the weeks to come, the Boston Celtics would romp to their 18th NBA Championship, losing just three games along the way and looking like the surest bet for sustained dominance that the league had seen since the KD & Steph Warriors. They were head and shoulders above the competition.

Now imagine someone came to you on the eve of the 2024 offseason. They told you that there was a world where the Knicks could not only break that conference finals drought, but beat those very Celtics in the process.

In this world, New York would end the season with a completely healthy roster, and on that roster would be an All-NBA co-star for Jalen Brunson. Better yet, they wouldn’t have to give up a single one of their own first round picks to acquire that player.

In this world, the Pacers would again be the team standing in their way. The Knicks would have home court advantage, would be backed by the most immaculate vibes the city has seen in a quarter century, and would ride those vibes to an eight-point lead with 35 seconds remaining in Game 1 at MSG.

Short of your health and the health of your immediate family, is there anything you wouldn’t have given up to see this eventual future come into existence?

Well, we got it.

And today, we reckon with the cost.

Sitting through nearly six hours of comments from die hard Knick fans on the postgame livestream after Game 6, there was a healthy mix of perspectives. Sifting through the comments to yesterday’s newsletter, it seems the same is true of folks here.

Some fans really enjoyed this season. Some found it frustrating from the very start. Even among the latter cohort, there seems to be begrudging appreciation for what this group was able to accomplish. This was a real run from a real team. As Fred Katz put it when he hopped on the Game 6 livestream in the middle of the night, this isn’t the 2021 Hawks.

Many fans are proud of this group.

Most do consider this season a success.

And despite the almost incomprehensibly maddening valleys they put us through, a great number of us enjoyed this ride more than we didn’t.

All of that is true, yet there is one key word missing from almost every description, summation and encapsulation of the 100 games we just experienced, at least from what I’ve seen:

Love.

How many people truly loved this team?

Of all the incredible emotions I’ve gotten to experience in my role at KFS, paramount among them was the joy of reading comments from fans who witnessed the 1970 and 1973 championships first hand and still claimed that last year’s Knicks were their favorite team of all time. Those comments were a reminder that just like romantic love, the love we have for our teams often defies logic. It has nothing to do with cap sheets, X’s & O’s or accolades. It doesn’t even depend on how far you get. It is a pure love, and in the case of the ‘23-24 Knicks, it was a love that even a 21-point Game 7 loss on their home court could not sully.

Sitting here today, there are many questions I’m grappling with regarding how to put this year’s group into proper perspective. First among them is why they were never loved.

On paper, the ‘24-25 Knicks gave us all the things that should make us fall in love with a team. They were good, for one. They rarely made you question their effort. They were led by one of the most beloved New York athletes of this century.

The rest of the roster was filled with players who gave you something to latch onto besides their skills and abilities. The star who finally got to play in his home town. The longtime trade target who rewarded that pursuit with the biggest plays at the biggest moments. The defensive demon who would have made DeBusschere proud. The scrappy, lay it all on the line, do everything utility man who personifies New York toughness to a T. And to top it off, two home grown players, one of which has quietly become the longest tenured Knick this century.

If this collective of players had one defining trait, it was that they didn’t know how to give up. They were never out of any game - a fact proven by five double-digit comebacks in the postseason, including three after being down by 20 points.

Is there a more inspiring quality in a team than perseverance? Is there a more New York quality? A year ago, perseverance through various injuries and obstacles was perhaps the strongest root of that love affair. What could be easier to love, after all, than a team who never lets go of the rope, no matter how dire the circumstances may appear? Even on Saturday night, when OG Anunoby hit a 3-pointer out of a timeout to cut the lead to 16 with 4:06 to go, there was a small part of me that said “maybe…just maybe…”

These Knicks earned that belief. Through sheer force of will and against the longest of odds, they earned it. On paper, they had done everything possible to earn our love.

It never came.

Why is that? The answer to the question, and why it fascinates me so much, is inextricably linked to why they are home today, and not preparing for a winner-take-all Game 7 in Madison Square Garden at 8pm.

But wait a minute…aren’t we forgetting about Game 1?

Yes…that Game 1, when the Knicks self-combusted into thin air in the final minutes of regulation? Isn’t that the reason their summer break started ahead of schedule?

After all, if Jalen Brunson makes a free throw, or Karl-Anthony Towns makes a free throw, or OG Anunoby makes a free throw, or the Knicks can grab a defensive rebound, or KAT and OG don’t have a miscommunication, or KAT doesn’t drop, or Jalen doesn’t throw that pass, or Josh Hart doesn’t slip, or that ball bounces one inch to the left or the right, tomorrow’s newsletter might have been the most celebratory one I’ve ever written.

Should a four-minute stretch from hell define a basketball team? Of course not.

So why did that Game 1 collapse feel so damn appropriate, even as it was happening?

Could it be that it was their destiny all along?

The 2023-24 Knicks died in the second round of last year’s playoffs, but it didn’t happen on May 19.

It actually happened one day earlier, when the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder were eliminated by the Dallas Mavericks in six gams. The loss confirmed that OKC was going to be aggressive in their approach last summer. With a bevy of cap space, they would go out and get their missing piece by any means necessary, even if it meant spending $30 million a year on a player who had been a backup on his own team just five months earlier.

Leon Rose can and should be praised for his forethought in building out this roster over the last five years, but this was the one thing he could not have anticipated. Hartenstein’s departure forced the Knicks to rethink everything - their starting lineup, their offensive and defensive philosophies, and indeed the entire identity of their team.

I-Hart encapsulated their heart in so many ways, and the earth shook when he went out the door, even if we didn’t realize it in the moment.

We’ll never know for sure how much that departure influenced their decision to acquire Mikal Bridges, but it is a near certainty that they knew Hartenstein was gone when they swung that trade. Even Bridges’ biggest supporters would find it difficult to argue that his first season in New York met expectations, but it’s just as hard to extricate that reality from the circumstances in which he was placed.

That brings us directly to the next decision, which was somehow far bolder than the choice to give up six round picks for a non-All-Star player.

There was almost certainly a world where they could have taken the safe road. Somewhere out in the ether, there was a traditional, rim-running, drop big man available on the market. It probably would have required Julius Randle to go out the door, which the organization was looking to do anyway, but they could have sent Randle out and still maintained some semblance of the identity they had before Hartenstein departed.

In all likelihood, such a trade would have been viewed as unsatisfying. It would have been seen as a half measure - a way to kick the can down the road for one more year. Maybe that wasn’t an option. Maybe the internal pressure to improve was too great. Maybe the value on the best available deal simply wasn’t there. Maybe that’s why they swung for the fences on Mikal even with the looming uncertainty at center. We’ll probably never know.

All we know is what we just saw: an organization that had slowly but surely become one of the surest things in professional sports that was suddenly awash in uncertainty.

When the games began, that uncertainty manifested itself in so many ways, both good and bad. An opening night demolition. A briefly historic offense. A double helix of possibility and disappointment over an 82-game slog. An 0-10 record against top teams. An undying resilience. A first-round nail-biter. Second round euphoria. A collapse for the ages.

There is no one person to blame for this situation, to the extent that there is anyone to blame for what was on paper the most successful season in 25 years.

The front office? Their report card remains incomplete for now, even if the benefit of the doubt decreases coming off that loss.

The coach? He gained no new supporters during this playoff run and moved more than a few swing voters to the other side of the aisle. It feels sometimes like 90 percent of the fan base views Thibs as the most responsible party for this loss. I wonder how much, if at all, that will impact their decision to retain him.

Ultimately, Leon Rose & Co will have to ask themselves whether this coach should have been able to build a more consistent, sustainable on-court product with the ingredients he was given. Were the structural flaws simply too great to overcome, even if certain decisions around the margins could have and arguably should have been different?

Which brings us back to where we started…

Love and trust don’t always go hand in hand, but you can’t have one without the other. The greatest love in the world cannot sustain without trust, and trust only goes so far without love.

We trusted the 2023-24 Knicks as much as any fan base could ever trust a team. Win or lose, we knew what we were going to get every night. That is why, on the final day of last season, there wasn’t an ounce of anger or disappointment in the air. We just felt bad that they weren’t able to give it their best healthy shot.

The 2024-25 Knicks never gained our trust. We never knew what we were going to get out of them from game to game or even quarter to quarter. My Own Worst Enemy became their theme song, and we had a front row seat for the concert.

They had chances to win that trust - so many chances over 82 games, and several more in this postseason - but consistently squandered it like they squandered the lead in those fateful closing minutes of Game 1, when whatever trust they had accumulated officially went out the window.

Game 6? Game 6 felt the death rattle of a team that was about to pass into the great beyond. The stars picked the worst time to have their worst games. The collective decision-making at both ends was wildly inconsistent. They never strung together big stops after halftime. They missed shots. They didn’t get back. The coach seemingly enabled it all every step of the way.

Unlike after their final game a year ago though, there is no sympathy to be found today. Even the people who appreciate this group are more than ready to move on from it. The reason, quite simply, is that human beings don’t like to be jerked around, and for the better part of seven months, rooting for this team felt like dating someone with bipolar disorder.

It didn’t always manifest in the same way, and it was almost never predictable. But it was present in the micro (say, KAT’s pick & roll defense, just to pick a random thing that’s in the news) and the macro (the starters’ net rating, for one). It was also present throughout the roster, where every key player besides Jalen had wild swings between incredible play and poor play throughout the season. The coach - often said to be the most dependable sideline presence in the sport - didn’t seem to help the situation.

With last summer’s acquisitions, it was up to a remade roster to build that trust back up to an acceptable level so that we might love again. They never got there.

Can the organization really move forward with a team that missed hitting that most vital of marks, with all the same key pieces intact?

That is the question Leon Rose needs to answer.

In doing so, he must acknowledge that trust takes time to build up. Trust between player and player, trust between player and coach, and trust between team and fan. Maybe time is the best thing he can give this roster between now and opening night next October.

Or maybe he has already seen enough.

We will find out the answer soon, probably sooner than we think. It will start with the coach, and from there, the rumors will start to emerge. Rumors about who wants in and who might be sent out. It’s going to be a wild ride, you can be sure of that.

We know from last offseason that no one - even someone with a Villanova alumni card - is safe. Rose will continue to analyze the situation until he is satisfied with the result. I doubt he is satisfied now.

Perhaps when he does, we will learn to love again.

Not now though. Not yet.

That is the hole we are left with in the aftermath of an incomprehensible run to the brink of the NBA Finals. That was the cost of success.

Was it worth it? Maybe there was never a choice to begin with.

Maybe the only choices that matter are the ones that lie ahead.

For now, this chapter - the 79th in the history of the New York Knickerbocker franchise - is closed.

How will it be remembered?

Only time will tell.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”