Out of the Abyss

A new era starts tonight.

Good Morning! You know what time it is…

News & Notes

🏀 The Knicks play a real basketball game tonight. Counts in the standings and everything.

It has been 155 days since New York last played a game that mattered. Like the previous 51 years, it ended in disappointment. Will Year No. 52 be any different? We’ll start to get our answer at 7:30 in Boston. As expected, Precious Achiuwa is out, but everyone else besides Mitch is good to go. The same goes for Boston outside of KP.

As a reminder…

Come party with us if you’re in the metropolitan area! I’ll be at T2 starting at 6pm, which means no halftime zoom tonight, but I’ll make the debut on Friday midway through the home opener.

🏀 A bevy of NBA extensions got done yet. There was one major veteran extension - Aaron Gordon, for four years and $133 million - with the rest being rookie extensions:

• Alperen Sengun: 5 years, $185 million

• Jalen Green: 3 years, $106 million (player option)

• Jalen Suggs: 5 years, $150.5 million

• Jalen Johnson: 5 years, $150 million

• Trey Murphy III: 4 years, $112 million

• Corey Kispert: 4 years, $54 million

• Jaden Hardy: 3 years, $18 million

As previously reported would not be the case, no extension for Mikal Bridges, as he’s likely to wait until next summer to extend.

KFS ICYMI…

Had the pleasure of talking to Jerome Williams, aka the Junkyard Dog, on the KFS Pod yesterday. Check it out on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Also, if you missed me and CP of Knicks Fan TV previewing the season with Dexter Henry for SNY, here’s that link as well.

Out of the Abyss

If we’re talking about the low point of the two-decade span from 2001 to 2020, there are no shortage of contenders.

But with all due respect to Isiah, Phil, Larry Brown, David Fizdale, Steve Mills, Jerome James, Joakim Noah, or anyone else you want to bring up, the darkest moment might be have been on draft night in 2013, as the Knicks were coming off their most successful season in over a decade.

That was the night the front office - who was in charge at the moment, we still don’t really know - dealt away a future first round pick to acquire Andrea Bargnani from the Toronto Raptors.

If “hope” is the most tantalizing commodity in sports, that trade may have been the moment when New York’s hope quotient reached its nadir, even if we didn’t realize it at the time.

Already out one future draft pick from the Carmelo Anthony trade, this sent a second future first out the door. Aside from Melo, the team’s veteran talent was uniformly past its prime, and Melo was about to head down a slippery slope of deep disenchantment with the organization. The team’s two moderately interesting young talents, Tim Hardaway Jr and Iman Shumpert, would be dealt away for next to nothing in the next 16 months.

Purely from a balance sheet perspective, they were a sinking ship with no life rafts or floatation devices in sight. The sports hope that is supposed to spring eternal had run dry.

The Knicks weren’t in the abyss.

They were the abyss.

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You think you know where I’m going with this, don’t you?