Darkness no more: Eulogizing the 2020-21 New York Knicks season
The Knicks’ 2020-21 season is gone, but it won’t be forgotten any time soon by those that were along for the wild ride.
The tried and true way to begin this article in years past would have been with some cliché like “Hello darkness, my old friend.” It would have been primped and polished in my drafts with 20 games left in the regular season, collecting more dust than a Roomba inside a dilapidated mansion. The piece would have been one of hope about ping pong balls determining the team’s fate in the draft lottery, when we would already know in our hearts that the Knicks wouldn’t move up in the draft anyway.
This ain’t your eulogy of yore. As always, you’ll have your uppers and your downers. You’re going to have one crowd where the silver linings are so encouraging that they don’t even feel like linings at all. Then you’ll have another crowd that feels like someone who bought GameStop at its lowest point and sold it two days after it fell sharply. The mindset is “Yeah, this stock did better than we all could have dreamed, but I sold my 100 shares at $225 instead of $347. I could have made even more money.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that the stock market is a gamble, because my mantra for the Knicks this past season was that the team and its fans were playing with house money. Either the Knicks improved upon last year’s win total and showed promise, or they lost most of their games and had a shot of landing top end talent in the draft. The former happened, and even though the Knicks will not be participating in the draft lottery for the first time since 2013, they can still find high quality talent outside of the top 14.
The hurt exists every season, but the glory isn’t always there in such large quantities. There was blowing out the Bucks for the first win of the season, the Austin Rivers game against the Jazz, thumping the Celtics by 30 in Boston, and Immanuel Quickley going off for 31 in Portland and then for 25 two games later in Cleveland. RJ Barrett discovered how to shoot, then forgot how to shoot, then rediscovered how to shoot. Then came the Derrick Rose trade, which, once the cost was public, wasn’t bad after all. We were blessed with a nine-game winning streak and 12 wins in 13 games, all of which started thanks to a furious comeback in an overtime win against the Grizzlies. We saw Randle take home Player of the Week and Player of the Month award honors in April and Tom Thibodeau receive the Coach of the Month award in May.
There were other memorable games, too. Beating the Mavericks in Dallas behind a monster game from Julius Randle was brilliant. Defeating Atlanta was a lot of fun, especially when Lloyd Pierce was still coaching the team. Handing the Kings a ninth straight loss after De’Aaron Fox’s now-deleted tweets was amusing. Beating the Clippers — in Los Angeles! — felt like a legitimate statement. And you know what? The beauty of this season is that there were so many wonderful moments, it’s possible I haven’t even listed your favorite one.
Of course, the negatives existed as well. We witnessed long stretches of mediocre offense thanks to the lack of a gifted primary ball handler. The Knicks set the record for the worst 3-point shooting percentage in a game. There were some egregious losses to teams like the Thunder, the Cavaliers, the Kings, the Bulls, the Magic, and the Timberwolves. New York hung tough in four-and-a-half of their six matchups vs. Philadelphia and Brooklyn, as well as letting go of the rope in Los Angeles against the Lakers. The NBA dealt with injuries and COVID, and the Knicks were no exception.
And yet, above it all, we saw the Knicks nearly double the projected wins Las Vegas had for them, going 41-31 with a top-five defense and torrid shooting late in the season. I’m proud of what this organization accomplished this season. I love that the Knicks finally have a front office and a coaching staff that have positively transformed the team. I remain in awe of Julius Randle’s accomplishments and ability to prove so many doubters wrong. I’m grateful that this island of supporting pieces proved that the whole can truly be greater than the sum of its parts in the regular season. Hell, I even appreciate the social media team recognizing the Knicks’ brand has untapped potential for high quality content.
The Knicks were exposed in the playoffs and lost to the better team. That gaggle of solid role players will only get you so far, and when your best players in Randle and Barrett fail, your season is over. Like with 29 other teams every season, we could play the “what if?” game until the cows come home. In the end, it doesn’t even matter.
The Knicks secured home court advantage in the first round of the playoffs, all the while being below the salary cap and having over $20 million in dead money. Yes, New York was paying 20% of its salary to players to not play for the Knicks. They accomplished this in the regular season with Randle transforming from a pumpkin into a carriage, Barrett serving as a second option at 20 years old, Robinson and Rose appearing in less than half the season’s worth of Knicks games, no Alec Burks for 23 contests, and starting Elfrid Payton in 63 of the 63 games he played. It’s easy to be a prisoner of the moment, but if someone told me six months ago that all of that would happen, I would have called them crazy. And finally, after getting over the shock, I would have been elated. I love the Knicks and I try to prioritize the team as much as I’d like, but when things were bleak, following this team could feel like a chore. That was never the case this year.
The Hawks are further along in their development. Atlanta is above the salary cap for the foreseeable future. They splurged this past offseason, signing Bogdan Bogdanovic and Danilo Gallinari, because their cap space would have dried up if they hadn’t signed at least one long-term contract. Finding your alpha through the draft gives you that opportunity. Fortunately, New York doesn’t need to follow the same blueprint, and barring Randle reverting back to his 2019-20 self and torpedoing the team to a 2022 top-five draft pick, that’s not what the Knicks will do anyway.
Every season, you learn new things. We saw tremendous growth from Randle and promise from Barrett. We recognized the front office’s ability to draft — at worst — quality rotation pieces in Obi Toppin and Quickley, not overpay for talent, and try to leverage its cap space into future assets. We discovered said front office hired a coaching staff that can develop and maximize said talent, all while fostering an environment where basketball junkies thrive.
On the flip side, we were reminded that the Knicks won’t go anywhere without a halfway decent point guard. The team needs to make an upgrade on the wing, and the team’s young talent needs to get better, which will happen as time marches forward. We can confirm that, no, Noel does not make Robinson expendable, and as good as Reggie Bullock can be, his role on a contender is off the bench.
You can consider this a eulogy for the season but it feels more like a celebration of life than anything to me. The avenues exist for the Knicks to return to the playoffs, all the while shoring up their areas of development and maximizing their strengths. It’s easy to ratchet up one’s expectations, decreeing that a second round appearance is mandatory to prove a step forward was taken. Even another first round exit would tell me that enough had to go right once again for this past season to not be considered a fluke, in a year where fans were mostly forced to watch from the comfort of their homes.
Let’s raise a glass and toast this team’s success. I’ll skip “The Sound of Silence” on Spotify, opting instead for something faster than 108 beats per minute. This article is hot off the presses and the only ping pong balls I have any interest in are the ones I’ll use for beer pong at some point this summer as I reunite with my similarly-vaccinated friends. Here’s to the Knicks, who gave me more reasons to smile in one magical season than in the previous seven combined.
