No. 11
Some thoughts on how we got here, why this feels the way it does, and the jersey number hanging over it all.
Good morning. Thanks for not minding yesterday’s shorter than normal edition. I made up for it today.
No. 11
Late Monday night (or more likely, Tuesday morning), as I was responding to a postgame comment about how far this franchise has come to get where it is today, I was reminded of a game that took place back in December of 2018 that will always stick with me for all the wrong reasons.
It was Christmas break, and my good friend Jeffrey Bellone - originator of this here newsletter and current author of the fabulous Mets Fix - was visiting from Connecticut with his family. We enjoyed some activities with the kids during the day before settling in for a scintillating night of Knicks basketball that evening.
This was something of a big deal for me and Jeff. We connected, bonded and eventually partnered together because of our shared love of the Knicks, but we had only watched a game or two side by side because we lived so far apart. With the Knicks having lost 11 of 12 and sitting a half game above the Cavs for the worst record in the league, we didn’t exactly have high hopes for a win, but we were looking forward to a fun evening regardless. The Jazz were two games below .500, so it wasn’t like we were facing a juggernaut. They might surprise us with a competitive game. Crazier things had happened before.
It didn’t take long before were were reminded that crazier things did occasionally happen…they just happened to other teams and not the Knicks.
The game was essentially over before it began, with the Jazz outscoring the Knicks 39-17 in the first quarter and more than doubling them up 71-34 at the half. Jazz rookie Donovan Mitchell was a plus-33 in 18 first half minutes, while the player who Phil Jackson passed over him to draft instead scored just two points on 1-of-7 shooting and was a team low minus-36.
This was particularly depressing on multiple levels, starting with the obvious fact that Mitchell looked like a star in the making, and the guy we got was shaping up to be one of the great draft miscalculations in Knicks history (and that’s saying something if you know even a little bit about the history of New York’s draft missteps).
But it was more than that. Here were me and Jeff, who had recently embarked on this endeavor with KFS, just dying to produce quality content about a quality basketball team. Not a great basketball team or even a good basketball team; just one that made us feel like we weren’t totally spinning our wheels.
So we did what any enterprising fellows would do: we made lemons out of lemonade.
Old KFS heads will recognize this well.
Jeff used to put out little videos like these on the regular. The ones featuring Ron Baker are the stuff of legend. Despite the fact that the Knicks stunk to holy hell, these videos helped the original KFS Twitter account blow up overnight a decade ago, back when this sort of thing was a novelty on the internet.
The irony of this particular video is that Jeff put the finishing touches on right before that December night we watched the Jazz game together. It featured the aforementioned “other guy” the Knicks picked over Donovan Mitchell in the 2017 Draft.
Unfortunately, no amount of sugar could turn poor Frank Ntilikina from a lip-puckering draft bust into an honest-to-goodness organizational building block, but to hell if Jeff and I didn’t try to convince ourselves otherwise.
And we weren’t the only ones. He debuted this newsletter in late March of 2019, and it garnered over 1300 sign ups in the first 24 hours. I started the KFS podcast the previous fall, and it became a hit almost instantly. I’d love to convince myself that my boyish charm was the impetus of that growth, but the reality is that fans all over the world simply craved the one thing they’d been missing for far too long:
Hope.
As Jeff and I sat there watching the decimation unfold in Utah, hope was in shorter supply than Frankie Smokes’ made baskets1. Yes, Kevin Knox was about to win Rookie of the Month, the Mitch kid looked interesting before he got hurt, we were sure to get a good pick in the upcoming draft, and rumors were swirling about KD having eyes for New York in the summer ahead, but none of that was tangible. The most tangible thing the Knicks had was less than a year removed from tearing his ACL, and even though we didn’t know it at the time, was a month away from getting shipped to Dallas for Dennis Smith Jr, a few firsts and cap space.
When that trade went down, the Knicks were in the middle of a stretch in which they lost 26 of 27 games. Read that sentence again. Now grab a chaser to wash it down.
This was life as we knew it, watching an eventual 129-97 loss in the midst of a 17-win campaign that came at the end of a half decade averaging 25 wins a season. We’d have sank into my living room couch like Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out if we could have.
Now imagine someone would have told us that in seven and a half years, we’d be ending a game in the first quarter against Donovan Mitchell like he ended that Jazz game against us, except that it wouldn’t be a nothing-burger in late December, but Game 4 of the conference finals, for an 11th straight playoff win, 10 by double figures, and a ticket to the Finals waiting at the final buzzer.
I think in that moment, my immediate questions would have been:
When did James Dolan sell the team?
Did we trade the first pick for AD to pair him with KD and Kyrie, or did we just draft Zion and let him grow with the vets?
Upon learning that Dolan not only hadn’t sold, but had morphed into a model owner, and that Durant would be on his fifth team by 2026, none of which were the Knicks, I’d have pivoted to my third question, which would have been (and this is the God’s honest truth, I swear on my children):
Is Frank Ntilikina still on the Knicks?
That’s not drinking the Kool Aide. That’s swimming in it.
But we had no choice. It was self-preservation by disconfirmation. We suppressed the present reality to believe in a future that had no signs of coming.
Except somehow, it did.
And sure enough, a point guard wearing No. 11 who the Knicks chose over Donovan Mitchell was at the center of all of it.
Sitting here now, almost 24 hours since the conclusion of Game 4, I still can’t believe what transpired. I can’t believe the Knicks went from the laughingstock of the sports world to a team playing better than anything we’ve ever seen. I can’t believe my good fortune in coming along when I did, at the ground floor of KFS, allowing me to build up this currency with fellow blue & orange blooded lunatics across the globe. I can’t believe they’re playing a brand of basketball we only dreamed of. I can’t believe the other shoe hasn’t dropped. I can’t believe that I don’t think it will.
Just about the only thing I can believe is how happy all of this is making me. I rarely dared to imagine what it would feel like if we made it to this point, and on the rare occasions I tried, I usually drew a blank. I guess when you’ve been beaten down as much as we have, thanks to one too many blowouts against the Jazz, you start to believe that “next year” will never come.
Except now, for the first time in multiple generations, maybe next year is this year. Maybe next year is right now.
On that note, in honor of the hope that Frank Ntilikina represented, the promise that Jalen Brunson delivered, and New York’s 11 straight wins headed into the NBA freaking Finals, here’s 11 things that put a smile on my face in the aftermath of the best night of my sports life:
