How should we feel about Julius Randle’s 2020-21 Knicks season from a safe psychological distance?

Now a comfortable distance removed from the 2020-21 season, how should we view the fantastic regular season Julius Randle put together in tandem with his lackluster first postseason?

We’re extremely stupid creatures, really. Given our self-appointed role as overlords of rational thought and civilization, on our cute little floating marble of a planet, we are impressively inept. Take breathing, a not unimportant skill, for example: turns out the majority of us are pretty awful breathers. It’s true. There’s a whole book about it and everything. So it must be true. Which is pretty incredible, because let’s be honest, as a species, we’ve got way too big an ego to be fucking up something so fundamentally important and basic as breathing. It’s embarrassing. It’s Ben Simmons (a combine harvester of a man) under the basket against Trae Young (a tissue paper factory of a man) levels of embarrassing. 

Unfortunately, it turns out, 22,000 embarrassing times a day, we are all functioning as under-the-basket Ben Simmonses.

Now that we’ve established this sobering baseline of human dumb: let’s talk about Julius Randle. How do you feel about the Most Improved Player in the NBA’s season, now that we’ve just about stopped weeping, after getting booted out of the playoffs by a very talented — and it must be noted: balding — tissue paper factory?

The stock answer to this question comes in the form of a pained stare out of the nearest window, accompanied by a confused pause, both stare and pause wordlessly expressing an answer in the form of another question: how am I supposed to feel about bad Julius Randle rising from the ashes of 2019’s nightmare and punching our beloved good Julius Randle in the nose? And then kicking him in the ribs? And then picking him up cartoon-style and launching him off screen in a casually emphatic Cancun-bound parabola?

This is how it feels. Conflicted and bitter with a faint nostalgic whiff of fermented Fizdale. 

Luckily, remember, we’re extremely stupid creatures. The way we feel about an experience is often a terrible representation of what the experience was actually like. Our brains are suckers for feelings getting in the way of facts, something wonderfully demonstrated by our potentially warped evaluation of the 2020-21 good-Julius, bad-Julius experience, the facts of which are as follows.

He played in 71 of 72 regular season games, averaging 24 points, 10 rebounds, and six assists. He shot 46% from the field, 41% from three, and 81% from the line. He made his first NBA All-Star team. He won the NBA’s Most Improved Player award. The Knicks won 41 games, twice as many as they were projected to win, and made the playoffs as maybe the most surprising four seed in NBA history. He’s 26 years old. 

He then played five playoff games, averaging 18 points, 12 rebounds, and four assists. He shot 30% from the field, 33% from three, and 85% from the line. The first three games of the series were Randle’s fifth-worst (26% in Game 1), 10th-worst (31% in Game 2), and worst by far (13% in Game 3) shooting games of the season. His eight turnovers in Game 5 were the second-most he had all season. He’s still 26 years old.

Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that those playoff games were his five worst games of the season, after 71 very good regular season games, giving us a 76 game sample of 6.58% awful and 93.42% very good. Show me a Knicks fan that wouldn’t have taken that oversimplified feel-good split at the start of this season, and I’ll show you the definition of delusion.

The problem is that those five extremely bad games came at the end of the season. In psychology, according to Wikipedia, this is called the “peak-end rule.” It’s the theory that people (read: dumb creatures) often incorrectly judge an experience largely on how they felt at its peak, or most intense point (i.e. publicly shitting your shorts in Madison Square Garden), and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

Appropriately for Knick fans, some of the studies used to test the peak-end rule include colonoscopies, a procedure that involves a long thin tube with a camera unceremoniously inserted into an uncomfortable orifice for a good old poke about. Kind of like torture. An invasive, and painful, and annoying form of torture. Effectively, the medicinal equivalent of facing Trae Young in the playoffs. In these studies, by varying the levels of pain at the end of the procedure — irrespective of the totality of pain — the patient’s perception of the whole experience could be manipulated.

Of course, in a horrendous oversight, this psychological theory doesn’t take into account the relative difficulty and significance of regular season versus playoff basketball as it pertains to the future success of Julius Randle as a New York Knick. It’s possible, in a cruel twist of rational fate, placing more evaluative weight on playoff shorts-shitting actually corrects for the fluffy-cloud competition of the regular season. This is entirely possible, but not a given. It’s equally possible that Randle just had his worst shooting games of the season at the wrong time. It’s even possible his poor playoff performance is a nuanced combination of these and other factors.

We don’t and can’t know the answer here. But what we can reasonably assume is that our brain’s emotional reaction to Julius Randle’s season is ripe for peak-end warping.

In the face of this cognitive booby-trap: it’s best to remember the good bits, and the very good bits, and the exceedingly good bits — of which there were many.

Almost every night, for five hazy months, Julius Randle was unfathomably good to us. The disappointment at his playoff flop is testament to the expectations forged in a fiercely redemptive regular season fire, that might just be the greatest developmental rags-to-riches story in league history. And that story — however unspectacular its end — was at its heart a tale of unexpected and unmitigated jaw-on-the-floor joy.

Putting Marvin Bagley on toast. Putting OG Anunoby on skates. Putting the Dallas Mavericks in their place. Taking calls and names and ballet-tough turnarounds from his office on the right block. Picking apart panicked defenses. Snatching wins with snarling game-winning steals. 

The dunks, the dishes, and the step-back swishes. The triple-doubles. The refreshing honesty on the failures that became fuel. The postgame pronouncements of long-awaited arrival. The walk-off fury at blown calls in big games. The work. The wins. 

All of these moments happened. All of them mattered. We should remember them, not only to burn the stink off the most recent playoff moments we’re trying to forget but are hardwired to focus on — but because they represent the narrative high point of a season and a player that epitomizes the reasons we bother to watch, and care so much, about basketball at all. 

Now, from a safe psychological distance, is a good time to take a few deep breaths, and collectively clarify our feelings about Julius Randle’s 2020-21 campaign. He was the best Knick on the best Knick team in nearly a decade: this is a fact. Both the team’s and Randle’s surprising success this season made it an overwhelmingly fun five months. A crucial ingredient in this season’s giddy sheen was how unexpected it all was. Every day we were pinching ourselves, free of the weight of expectation, reveling as a fanbase in the emergence of a team that didn’t exist in December. Randle was the beating heart of this fever dream, his own impossibly sudden emergence a microcosm of the New York Knick franchise lurching back into relevance: it would be wrong to remember him as anything less.

Stupid creatures as we are, surely we’re smart enough not to turn our nose up and nitpick at overwhelmingly unexpected fun.

Especially in this particular sun-starved corner of NBA fandom, where the bar for annual success has been hovering around mere survival for what seems like eternity. Any Knick success story boldly venturing into the unknown atmosphere beyond this meager baseline is surely worthy of celebration without caveats. Julius Randle took his game and this team to places we never thought possible, as the architect of the sweetest Knick season I can remember. His 2020-21 vintage is one we should never forget.