A toast to the imperfect, but hopefully fun 2020-21 New York Knicks

These 2020-21 Knicks might largely stink. Some players that fans fall in love with this year may eventually be moved due to the nature of the always star-thirsty NBA. But hopefully they’ll show improvement and the roots of something great, and for that reason, Jack Huntley would like to propose a toast.

Bring us the slow and satisfying redemption of our Canadian savior. Bring us 72 nights of internalized point guard angst. Bring us the unbridled enthusiasm of a fresh faced and irresistibly innocent rookie. Bring us the storied competitiveness of a head coach guided home by either an irresistible nostalgia, or an irresponsible nepotism, on the winds of either fate or folly, depending on who you ask. Bring us professional basketball, a nightly balm and distraction, the soundtrack to our living room bubbles, as outside, normality slowly succumbs to a potent and stubborn surrealism.

Bring us the 2020-2021 New York Knicks, warts and all.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Bit crowded under the tree isn’t it? Lots of nervous rustling and optimistic preseason platitudes — “Improved team defense!” “Playing with pace!” “Shooting form tweaks!” — strangely and symbolically muffled by wrapping paper and tape. We’ve all had Knicks-related seasonal gifts before. Socks and scarfs and long-burnt jerseys. But the real life Knicks? That is by default the best possible present any of us could get, even if the evil Vegas number people have them as the co-worst team in the league.

This century may rightfully laugh at anyone who takes refuge in the rickety shelter that is the New York Knicks, but having the blue and orange band back is a welcomed sign of some kind of normality. It’s a brand of normality we are, unfortunately, very used to. Another round of rebuilding. Another season looking up, straining our necks, gazing at the NBA big boys, while we play with toy tanks and strain our brains pronouncing fancy words like “dev-el-op-ment.”

While we are undeniably facing another season jostling for lottery tickets, we are further along in the lifecycle of a rebuild than in recent years. Funny things, NBA rebuilds. They’re like euphemisms for maniacal at-all-costs star-fucking. Stepping back, getting a better view of The Big Picture, the same one that looms over every franchise in the league, the Knicks are still — like last year, and the year before that — positioning themselves to get laid by a certified Star. For every rebuilding team — all evaluations, all decisions, all wins and losses — all roads lead to hypothetical star acquisition X. 

The Knicks have a new front office, led by Leon Rose, who hired a new coaching staff, led by Tom Thibodeau, who seems to be well suited to and smitten with the team’s best young player — RJ Barrett. The Knicks have a number of theoretically maturing assets, of assorted value, who should collectively improve with time. The Knicks have the most cap space in the league. The Knicks have an excess of future draft picks, and are pencilled in as a likely top-5 pick in the summer of 2021’s stacked NBA Draft.

The Knicks have a lot of avenues through which to acquire, groom, or draft the one thing they don’t have, and the one thing that matters to stop the cycle of rebuilding: sustainable and contractual nights of passion with hypothetical Star X. In these days of peak ringz fandom, if your team doesn’t have a star, every season is measured by its unbending adherence to standards of scientifically acceptable team building philosophy. 

It’s this line of thinking that makes the notion of the neophyte quintet of the hour — Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett, Kevin Knox, Obi Toppin, and Mitchell Robinson — growing old together in orange and blue a ridiculous one. Ha! Not a chance! Watching promising players, who you like, play together, for a long period of time? That’s neanderthal talk. A primitive grunt of a team building philosophy. This just isn’t how it works in today’s NBA. The Law of the Star Player dictates that if none of these five guys are a star, the best use of them is to farm and flip them for someone who is. This makes sense if you want to win championships, but is a harsh developmental line in the sand to know exists as we watch these kids grow and form ultimately doomed attachments to each of them.

Ringz fandom is a bit of a psychological downer, really, especially for a team and fanbase as starved of players and collections of players worthy of enduring affection as our New York Knicks (See: Love, Unconditional, of Ntilikina, Frank). Maybe a fixed term of Quickley’s Quintet, all five guys under 22 years old, locked into the Knicks’ rotation for a decade, wouldn’t result in an eventual title, but it might be more enjoyable than the median outcome of year-over-year star-churn that is the analytically-approved alternative. Better the floor you can invest in than the ceiling that may not exist, type of thing.

Luckily, for now, the 2020-21 Knicks’ big and small pictures more or less align. We can indulge big picture team building — developing and evaluating the youngsters in a competitive and culturally acceptable environment — while enjoying the small picture pleasures of occasionally fun basketball that makes sense and is nice to watch. Win-win! Well, maybe, if Thibs can actually thread this needle. There are areas of grey here — if he plays the vets too much, if the pieces refuse to dovetail, if big bad Mr. Knicks Dysfunction rears his ugly head.

Mostly though, this looks like a season with a relatively safe spread of outcomes. RJ improves a little or a lot. Mitch, Knox, Frank, and Dennis Smith Jr., either regress, grow, or plateau. Quickley and Toppin look like rookies who can help, or just look like rookies. The motley crew of free agency vets net an asset or two. Thibs either occasionally smiles or murders everyone. In all of these permutations, the Knicks lose a lot of games. 

Losing a lot of games this season gets you at worst a high end contributor, and at best a Cade Cunningham. No matter what, so the theory goes, we either win or win big in this particular draft. And when the star dust settles after Cade’s coronation — whichever snapback crown he ends up with — we can take pause to see where we stand in relation to that shiny rebuilding checkpoint. Who knows, maybe after these 72 games, we can delete NBA Star Tinder. Happiness is, I’m told, theoretically possible in the NBA.

But we do have to play these 72, and it is going to be oh so brutal, no matter how intoxicating the preseason parade-vibes are. It will take us approximately a week this season to replace the sobering number in the loss column with Cade’s hope shaped face. Don’t fight it. Losing sucks and hope is nice. It’s inevitable.

With any luck, after this awkward and echoey sprint of a season is in the books, things off the court will feel a little more normal, and just a smidge less apocalyptic.

In the meantime though, Merry Christmas and a Happy New York Knicks season. This roster is rough around the edges, but the seams are reinforced by a thousand trademark Thibodeau-drilled repetitions. There’s a little bit of festive hope hidden in those seams, and more than a few positives to toast to from a socially safe distance.

Here’s to big picture baby steps. Here’s to a hundred angry timeouts. Here’s to RJ Barrett crossing names off his list. Here’s to the concept of NBA spacing. Here’s to whatever exists beyond the horizon of rebuilding. Here’s to MSG folk hero Immanuel Quickley. Here’s to Frank Ntilikina, our beautiful cockroach, surviving another season. Here’s to David Fizdale’s unemployment ‘fro. Here’s to every richter-registering, rim-rocking Obi Toppin dunk. Here’s to the better-late-than-never arrival of regular season Kevin Knox. Here’s to a developmental staff. Here’s to Friday nights spent with Clyde. Here’s to Mitchell Robinson inhaling 3-pointers. Here’s to Brock Aller’s brain doing diabolically innovative margin-shattering things. Here’s to Julius Randle not doing that. Here’s to a shitload of losses and the reinforcements they come with.

Here’s to the 2020-2021 New York Knicks, finally back, warts and all. Buckle up for a quick and dirty 72. Soak up the good bits. Grab a beer or two for the bad bits. And for the really bad bits, close your eyes and think of Cade.