A humdrum win over a low-down lot points to the Knicks having leveled up

When did the Chicago Bulls become champions? I don’t mean literally. If you weren’t alive in 1991, trust me: Michael Jordan winning that first ring, like doing the Urkel . . . there was no missing it. The Bulls weren’t champs. Then they were. When did that happen? 

(Yes, this is a recap of the Knicks’ 120-99 win in Washington last night.)

"When I was a child, I understood as a child and spoke as a child,” Burt Lancaster says in Elmer Gantry. “When I became a man, I put away childish things." There’s an easy, sinister lie repeated ad nauseum among coaches, athletes, media and fans that pretends titlists don’t actually exist until the moment the final buzzer sounds and they’re the last team standing, like some magical alchemy can’t be accessed until the very end. These are often the same people who think sex doesn’t begin until penetration and that it finishes when they do. We can all be better.

Were the Bulls not yet champions when they were up 16 entering the fourth quarter of the title-clincher? What about when they entered that game up 3-1? The team that rolled through the Eastern playoffs with 11 wins in 12 games was the same one that asphyxiated the Lakers over five games and the same one that entered the playoffs with homecourt throughout. How far back can we trace their moment of conception?

Go back one year earlier. If the ‘90s Bulls were the Marx Brothers, 1990 was Zeppo (if you need a fresher reference: if the ‘90s Bulls are the Jonas Brothers, 1990 was Frankie; if you need a fresher reference than the Jonas Brothers, this is not the recap for you). The ‘90 Bulls are mostly regarded as a historical curiosity, the last year Jordan played a full season in Chicago without winning a ring. But this was a great team; they won 55 games, including two nine-game winning streaks and two five-game winning streaks, and if you took those 28 wins away they were still .500. After breezing through the first two rounds, they faced Detroit in the conference finals for the second straight year and the third straight postseason. The prior series ended 4-1 and 4-2 in favor of the Pistons. 

The ‘90 Bulls fell behind 2-0. Include that regular season and the last three games of their ‘89 ECF and that made nine losses in 10 games for Chicago against Detroit. No one at that point would have thought of those Bulls as anything more than a nice team, a team no one wanted to face in a playoff series; tomorrow’s team, maybe – but not today’s. So when they rallied to win three of the next four and force a Game 7, was that not the first cells of a champion dividing? They went on to lose the series finale, the Scottie Pippen migraine game. Do we dismiss them as also-rans because for one night, their second banana had such a splitting headache he couldn’t see?

Conception is beyond the limits of our vision. Life begins long before we’re aware. The 1990 Bulls, like the 1994 Knicks, 2005 Pistons, 2012 Thunder, 2015 Cavaliers and others throughout history were champions de facto. Sometimes we’re not aware of new life because it’s taken a form we don’t recognize. Take the 2015 Warriors.

(Yes, this is a recap of the Knicks’ win in Washington. One more minute!)

The 2016 Warriors were thisclose to G.O.A.T. status, and the 2017 and 2018 versions were their best selves. But the ‘15 team, the one that started it all, looks so dominant in review it’s hard to imagine they weren’t the consensus to win it all. Golden State led the league in field goal percentage, 3-point accuracy, assists, opponent field-goal percentage and opponent 2-point accuracy, while ranking fifth in opponent 3-point marksmanship. And they were no consensus favorite. Because people didn’t think they looked the part. They were so focused on the tree they didn’t notice the whole forest had changed.

Skeptics didn’t think a “jump-shooting” team could win the title because they’d never seen it happen before. Ignoring the malpractice of ignoring Golden State’s core identity as an elite defensive team, this stereotype failed for the reason all stereotypes do: the truth is always more complicated than its synopsis. Jump-shooting teams historically struggled to win because for most of basketball history, most jump shots were twos, many contested by world-class athletes, and it turns out even world-class athletes struggle to make jump shots contested by other world-class athletes. There was little reason to prioritize jumpers; post-ups and lay-ups were contested, too, but also easier to make. With everyone hunting from the midrange to the rim, there was limited value in chasing points farther from the hoop, where the odds were worse. But what if there were a team that did it differently? What if they were so exceptional they could spread out behind the arc and just beat teams down with threes, instead?

Which brings us to the Knicks’ 120-99 win over the Wizards.

With a little less than four minutes left, Jalen Brunson missed a long two that Mitchell Robinson got enough of a hand on to tap into open space. Kyle Kuzma almost had it, but Brunson knocked it free, after which he, Daniel Gafford and Corey Kispert all went to ground to retrieve it. The Knicks were up 13 in a game they’d controlled from the jump, against a Wizards team that had as much chance of coming back to win as Vivek Ramaswamy does in a country where millions of voters hate brown skin like his and millions more hate racists like him. Washington’s basketball team, like its government, is a hopelessly flawed operation dominated by two equally loathsome parties. As always, it’s the people who suffer while the powers responsible skate on by. Pour one out for fans stuck with Kuzma and Jordan Poole’s eternally mid mid-Atlantic antics, though remember we once endured a Knick team whose leading scorers were Al Harrington and Nate Robinson.  

The NBA is desperate for everyone to swallow the idea that the in-season tournament is a gift to the fans and not a bargaining chip for the league in its next media-rights negotiations, so we’re supposed to see Brunson’s dive as proof of concept. Instead I was initially treated to the shock of hearing someone scream when he hit the floor, then stunned further after realizing the screams were coming from me. Why was I bugging? Because there’s more at stake now, I realized in that moment. Realized for the first time. I entered this year defining success as the Knicks matching last year’s output. While Donte DiVincenzo is a good addition, it’s not like New York added a heavyweight. I expected to be more than content with these Knicks being solid for a second straight season, something not seen in these parts since . . . 2001? 2000?

And yet last night the Knicks, missing two starters, knocked the Wizards to the canvas with an opening-round knockout, then took away the body in the middle rounds so when the final round came, Washington had no fight left to give. Even without RJ Barrett and Quentin Grimes’ 3-point lethality, the Knicks drilled six threes in the opening quarter, half of them care of Magic Brunson, part of a 9-of-16 opening half for them from downtown. New York entered the fourth up five, held the home team without a basket for nearly eight minutes and won by 21.

The body blows come from the bigs and the boards, and this is where I wonder if the Knicks, like the 2015 Warriors, have become something people aren’t able to see yet. It’s still early in the season; 7-5, while better than fine given the team’s early schedule, is not 16 wins in springtime. It’s not 82 games. Not 28. It’s not even 13. And no, the 2024 Washington Wizards are hardly the 1990 Pistons or the LeBron/Kyrie/Love Cavaliers.

Nevertheless, these Knicks impose their will on everybody, physically, good teams and bad. After the game, the Wizards’ Tyus Jones sounded like he was describing Pat Riley’s Knicks when discussing Tom Thibodeau’s: “They want to slow you down, play physical basketball, especially on the defensive end of the floor. They want to play physical, hard-nosed, pack the paint, kind of wear you down throughout the night, throughout the game. That’s what they did.” Even in a game where no Knick had 10 rebounds, seven had four or more; in one of the season’s quirkier trends, the Wizards barely had more offensive rebounds (7) than the Knicks did players with multiple offensive rebounds (4). Immanuel Quickley put the finishing touches on the win with 16 points in the fourth. No better display of the power of a mother’s love than seeing IQ showcase the full repertoire with his mom seated front row in his jersey, cheering all the while.

Is this the year it all comes together? Thibodeau’s previous Knick teams have excelled on both ends, though rarely at the same time: in 2021 New York was third in defensive rating but 23rd in offensive rating; last year they rose to third on the offensive end, but were only 19th defensively. So far they’re top-five in defensive rating and nearing the top-10 despite whatever hex someone cast so that they still can’t make a free throw or a paint two. How many teams in the East would you say the Knicks can’t beat in a seven-game series if both are around full strength? Boston and Milwaukee, I say, and that’s it. Think about that: in the whole big bad East, of the 14 other teams, the Knicks could/should beat 12 of ‘em. Then think about the vagaries of playoff matchups and how banged up teams are come May and June. A break here, a break there. Could the Knicks find themselves in the Finals? 

If they do, it won’t have started in June. Or April, when the postseason begins. It will at least be traceable back to November, when Jalen Brunson dove after a loose ball near the end of a game his team couldn’t lose. The Knicks haven’t won an NBA title; they need to win their last two In-Season Tournament games just to have a shot at minor hardware. But they don’t need a trophy for this to be clear: these Knicks are already something.