The Decade That Was
Looking back on memories both good and bad, and lessons learned
Well we made it. The end of the teens.
The next decade has to be better than the one that’s ending, if only because my liver can’t possibly make it through another ten years of this.
On that note, perhaps the universe was prescient when it decided to locate my first major Knicks memory of the 2010’s in a bar, or more specifically, behind one.
(If you were expecting an All-Decade Team today, sorry, but I’d rather gurgle bleach than try to decide who was the best Knick point guard of the last 10 years. Throw a dart; you’ll probably land on as good an answer as any.)
July 8, 2010.
I was working service bar in East Midtown that night, fully preparing for LeBron James to take the mic and announce that he was making the only move that truly made sense in my blue and orange mind.
I may have been 27, but I was still naive enough to think that good thinks happened to my team, and that high and low periods just ran alternatively in cycles. The first nine years of my rooting life, after all, had been glorious. The last nine, not so much. It was time for things to revert back to form.
Of course it didn’t work out that way. As a result, I had all the drinks that night, and nobody else got theirs. The only picture I’ve ever seen from the evening was me, alone, on the dance floor, in a crouching position, with the only human soul nearby looking down at me like one would a wounded, smelly animal. I had finally, fully embodied the team I lived and died by. On that night, I died, probably more than a few times.
Oddly enough, most of the next half of the decade was a steady upward climb, albeit on a rickety track that you knew would probably give out at any moment and send us all up in a fiery blaze of glory.
Those first three Amar’e months were as good as anything since the ‘99 playoff run. They felt earned, and quite real, and even if the ceiling wasn’t the one we were promised, damn if it didn’t feel wonderful to be relevant again.
Then, on the night between the two days I took the bar exam, it finally happened: We got Melo.
Much like I felt incredibly hopeful but slightly dubious about the legal career that awaited me in a few months, the manner in which Anthony was acquired (which we knew even then to be an obvious hijacking of what should have been the stare down Donnie Walsh was preparing for his entire life) left a bittersweet taste in my mouth. The early basketball we saw didn’t make it any more palatable.
Then came April 19, 2011 - Game 2 against a Celtics team we knew was far superior but, my God, what a win in the Boston Garden would have meant.
Given the stakes, what Carmelo Anthony did that night - 42 points on 30 shots, 17 boards, six dimes and two blocks - is still the most amazing performance I’ve ever seen by a Knick. And then Jarred Jeffries Jarred Jeffried away the game and, well, that was that.
The next season turned out to be one so unbelievable that even the most desperate Hollywood producer wouldn’t have bought the script rights.
Almost as much I can recall exactly where I was for every key moment of Linsanity, the other thing I’ll always remember about the 2011-12 season was just how disappointing the Knicks were early on. People think this season has been rough? Iman Shumpert, Starting Point Guard made Point Julius look like Magic Johnson.
That team started an abysmal 8-15 despite an over under of 41.5, which sounds bad enough until you remember it was a 66-game season. They were under-performing more than perhaps any Knick team in history, right up until a kid from Harvard came along and stole all of our hearts. When the second Sports Illustrated in a row came in the mail, I thought someone was playing a joke.
Linsanity wasn’t a moment in history as much as it was a psychedelic trip where you kept waiting for a come down that never came. That is, until Melo returned and either couldn’t or wouldn’t accommodate the new guy.
It took me until recently to forgive Anthony for that, mostly because that Knicks team felt like it could do something special if they all banded together. Instead, it spiraled, Mike quit, Stoudemire put his hand through some glass, and the silliest celebration in the ignominious history of silly celebrations occurred after the Knicks ended their playoff winless streak, down 0-3 to the Heat, still seemingly a million miles away from real contention.
And then a funny thing happened: the modern NBA took shape, right here in New York, with the unlikeliest cast of characters this side of Cats. Except this worked like a charm.
Despite how that season ended, it’ll always be the team I embrace most as an adult, mostly because it was the first season I watched with my now wife, but also because the other shoe you kept waiting to drop never dropped. For the first time since I was a teenager, I got to experience the feeling of going into games knowing we were supposed to win…and actually winning. And they were so, sooooo much fun.
And then Woody moved Melo back to the three, Roy Hibbert went vertical, and the rest, as they say, is history.
The 2013-14 team seemed snake-bitten from the very start, losing games in more and more unfathomable ways until they got so far out of it that the year prior seemed like a distant memory. Perhaps giving up real assets for one of the five worst players in the league on draft night was a harbinger of things to come.
(I still remember trying to explain that trade to my wife the night it went down, and how despite his stats and pedigree, getting on the Bargs Bandwagon was not a good thing.)
The day they hired Phil was a legitimately happy moment, and then he started to make trades, and you could tell pretty quickly that something had gotten lost in translation from the bench to the front office.
The day Jackson re-signed Anthony also brought many smiles, but in the way that a girlfriend who is completely wrong for you comes back home after a fight. You’re happy, not because it’s right, but because you’re not ready to imagine life without her.
2014-15 was the first time I spend watching more college ball than Knicks games. KAT, Okafor, D-Lo, Winslow…these guys got me through a year where New York didn’t have a single player I ever had any desire to watch again for as long as I lived. It was rough.
On lottery night 2015, I again found myself in a bar for perhaps the most anticipatory evening since the Decision. Thankfully this time, I had to pay for my consumption. As I prepared to settle up my tab after we got the fourth pick, I Googled the name “Kristaps Porzingis” for the first time. I then ordered a shot for the road.
Of course that sentiment changed quickly once Summer League began, and we saw that this lanky Drago impersonator could actually play. He got us through 2015-16 much like another lanky seven-footer got us all through the end of last season. Thank God for KP his rookie year, because with the Knicks out of a pick, there was quite literally nothing else worth tuning in for.
And then came the Super Team.
Ah, yes…glorious.
That 16-13 start felt like a house of cards from the first tip, but of course we rode with it while we could, right up until the wheels came off and every day ended with a nightly prayer session that Carmelo Anthony would waive his no trade clause.
I wasn’t the only one praying, except bedside wishes weren’t enough for Phil Jackson, who took things too far, pissed off the wrong Latvian, and got himself canned one week after drafting the perfect point guard to run his precious offense.
Which kinda, sort of, brings us to…today. Frank Ntilikina was drafted 30 months ago, but for me at least, it feels like his arrival (and Scott Perry’s soon to follow) was the beginning of the era we now find ourselves in.
Perhaps that’s simply because he’s the longest tenured player on the roster. Or maybe it’s because Knicks Film School was built on his outstretched wingspan, and all the gloriously unheralded things it could do while no one was looking. Or it could be that just a few months before he was drafted, my work started appearing online in places outside of just my Tumblr page.
If you don’t believe me, here’s my very first piece about how to fix the Knicks in eight easy steps (it seemed so simple then!) which has enough cold takes to fill your freezer. Writing about this team, at first as a hobby to kill time on the train, now as an all-consuming second full-time job, has not only helped put the last decade in perspective, but has brought clarity about what needs to happen so that the next ten years aren’t a repeat of the former.
If all that has happened since the night LeBron said no has taught us nothing else, it should be this: both the Knicks as an organization and us as fans would be best served by stopping, standing still, and taking a nice, long, deep breath.
No more nights where the fate of the franchise rests on the bounces of a few lottery balls or the whims of a particular superstar.
Stop positioning yourself for the next “blockbuster” trade and just make sure the players already on the roster feel valued, and that they (and their families) are in a situation where they trust they can be happy and successful.
And finally, to borrow the advice of my daughter’s favorite human, real or imaginary, Anna from Frozen, just do the next right thing (apologies to those of you without kids, or who don’t see every movie imaginable. Claudio, I’m looking at you.)
That doesn’t mean sitting idly by and not making moves. It means drawing walks and hitting singles, with the occasional double sprinkled in if another franchise is as desperate as we’ve been for 20 years and counting.
It also means getting off the top of this list, when the next version of it is made:
That’s New York for you…always churning, churning, churning. It’s not an accident that the lowest numbers on here almost exclusively belong to the league’s model organizations.
Here’s a novel idea: instead of preserving every ounce of cap space for the next white whale, maybe sign Damyean Dotson to a tidy little two, three or —gasp— four-year extension. I know the franchise was burned by extensions large and small over the last decade (Melo, JR & Lance Thomas, by my recollection, were the only ones signed), but that doesn’t mean it always has to be that way.
LeBron, Amare, Melo, Phil, KP, KD…so many saviors either have or haven’t walked through the doors of MSG, but the weight of it all - the unnerving, chaotic energy that always seems to envelop this organization like a cloud of hungry termites - gets to them eventually. More than anything, there’s a part of me that hopes the next decade brings a moment where the Knicks are referred to by a term I’ve never heard used to describe them in my lifetime:
Boring.
That’s why, more than anything, I don’t want to read about the next coaching target, or Karl-Anthony Towns, or Anthony Edwards, or hell, even the guy I’ve been writing about myself, Masai Ujiri.
That’s right…I’m as guilty of failing to follow my own advice as anyone. I just hope the people running this team, for however long they’re still there, take it and embrace it.
The last decade was defined by instability. As if there was any doubt before, we learned that no, you can’t build a house on quicksand, even in the Mecca of Basketball. James Dolan, if you’re listening, find your Glen Sather, whether it’s Steve Mills, Masai Ujiri, or Jesus Christ himself.
(Does Jesus require draft compensation? Will they settle for a pick swap?)
Whoever it is, let the person that begins next season with the job of running this organization keep it until some other poor soul is writing their own version of this column ten years from now. And please, Jim, once you make that decision, just stay out of the damn way. Butting in - even when you fired Phil because he tried to trade the franchise savior, and everyone, including the fans, universally told you it was the right thing to do - has never worked out in your favor.
No more impromptu pressers. No more PR shenanigans. No more listening to whispers from your inner circle. No more managing the Garden by trying to instill the fear of God Himself into every employee who walks the hallways. No more of all of the things that gave us the last decade.
You have the power to make the next ten years far better than the last 20. The evidence is plain as day.
Here’s to making the 2020’s the Decade of Normalcy at MSG.
We can do this together. We have to.
I’m getting too old for the damn bar.
Happy New Year everyone! If you haven’t already done so, send in your mailbag questions to KFSMailbag@gmail.com before noon today.
See you all Thursday morning with a recap of Knicks Blazers from New Year’s Day.