Repeat Viewing

Wait, wait, wait...haven't we seen this movie before?

Good morning. The Knicks are back home tonight to play the Clippers, who have won five of six against the Knicks and come in with the second best net rating in the NBA since December 21. What could possibly go wrong?

Repeat Viewing

My sophomore semiformal. The time my wife and daughter simultaneously had COVID. The aftermath of a hot sauce challenge I did at Greenport Fire.

These are all experiences I’d like very much not to relive.

You can add the ‘24-25 Knicks season to that list.

This would probably come as a surprise to most NBA fans who aren’t tuned into Knicks basketball, but readers of this newsletter know exactly where I’m coming from. If you’d told 2019 me that a 51-win season could come with so little joy, I’d have asked 2025 me to give past-tense me some of what he was smoking.

You could argue that the postseason made the regular season worth it and then some, but that isn’t really the case either. The first round was a misery fest that could have gone to a Game 7 if any one of a handful of plays go the other way¹. Then they played well for exactly 10 of 24 quarters against Boston and got lambasted in the other 14. And that was all before the single most devastating sports loss of my lifetime (which was followed by a whimper of a Game 2 that never gets discussed but counted just as much as the one that preceded it).

To some, the playoffs served as proof that no matter how underwhelming a regular season might be, the Knicks should never be counted out. That’s true; they shouldn’t.

But let’s also not pretend like the 2025 postseason confirmed the Knicks to be something they aren’t. All the issues from the regular season were still present. The starting lineup was worse. The lows were just as low. They no-showed several times. A few big shots and two miraculous fourth quarters just overcame all of it.

Why am I reliving the past on a day when we should all be focused on how to fix the present? Because those who don’t learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them, and I have to say, I’m wondering today whether team brass took away the right lessons from the totality of last season.

Seeing all the takes comparing this January swoon to last January’s swoon, I went back and re-read some of my newsletters from that time. My reaction to the January 6 Magic loss (their third straight following OKC’s come-from-behind fourth quarter win and their exhaustive defeat at the hands of Chicago) might as well have been written following the Sixers loss from this past weekend. The ‘24-25 Knicks ended that three-game slide with a tougher-than-it-should-have-been win over a bad Raptors team, but following it up with a thrashing at the hands of the Thunder. My missive after that OKC defeat could have easily been written in response to the Pistons game that just happened:

“I don’t really know what to think about what - or who - I just watched. I know I’m annoyed, frustrated, a little angry, more than a little worried, and extremely curious about where this season goes from here. But in terms of a definitive opinion about what, precisely, this team is? I’m as lost as ever.

I ended that little diatribe by writing that the Knicks were “a team who got hit in the mouth and didn’t know how to respond.”

Sound familiar?

From there they mostly stabilized, or at least their version of stability, beating almost all of the teams they were supposed to beat and losing to almost all of the teams they were supposed to lose to, mostly in dispiriting fashion. We never got a sense that they truly solved whatever started plaguing them in early January, only that they managed to work around those issues well enough to have a deep playoff run.

We know what happened from there. Tom out, Mike in, and off we went, hopefully to engage in a far more pleasant endeavor this season.

For a while, that’s exactly what we got, but even the beginning of this season carries parallels to last year. The bumpy start. Questions about players adjusting to new roles. Brutal mid-December losses (to the Hawks in the 2024 Cup quarters; to the Magic in Orlando this season). Insanely hot shooting carrying an offense that looked unstoppable. A few inspiring nail-biters over middling to bad teams to end the calendar year (San Antonio and Washington in ‘24; Indy, Cleveland and New Orleans in ‘25).

And then the moment when everything seemed to turn.