Reunion, closure and another W: all in a night’s work — a special night — for the New York Knicks

I’m working on a screenplay based on my life with an ex. After a few years together, we broke up. I moved, hundreds of miles away, unsure where my next job or home would be. Six weeks later I was back in the area, hired to teach at a university. Turned out she was, too. Same university. Same program. 

Adjuncts being academia’s untouchable caste, I did not have an office. We were all given a desk to share with another adjunct. Guess who my deskmate was? Yup. A few days a week it was my workspace; the rest were hers. Imagine the awkwardness. Or don’t; hopefully the screenplay gets finished and picked up and you can see it all for yourself.

The New York Knicks saw their exes for the first time since trading RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley three weeks ago. They share the same division, so they’ll be seeing a lot of each other for a while. Both teams feel like they got what they were hoping for. Last night they shared the court at MSG, but that’s where the similarities stopped, as the Knicks owned the final three quarters of a 126-100 victory.

New York is eighth in the league in both offensive and defensive rating. Toronto’s 17th and 19th. Four Knicks scored 17 or more, led by Immaculate Brunson’s 38, his fourth consecutive game of 30+ points; only RJ scored that many for the visitors. Julius Randle had a triple-double. The blue and orange won the last three quarters 95-69. One team is built for now; the other is buffering. Being built means you can take a hit and keep coming.

It also means you can dish them out as needed.

The Knicks have taken the hits, the critiques and the jokes for most of this century. Since trading RJ and IQ, they’re 9-2, winning by an average of nearly 18 points a game. The two losses were each by four. Breakups don’t always have a winner and a loser. Sometimes breaking up is the W. Barrett was never going to be what the Knicks needed from their third banana. Quickley was a starter trapped in the body of a Thibodeau sixth man. In Toronto, OG Anunoby was one jumbo wing among many, his value as a ceiling-raiser wasted on a team playing its worst ball since the days of Amir Johnson, Andrea Bargnani and José Caldéron.

So far this looks like one of those happy breakups, where the parents stay friends and the split leads to one happy blended family rather than two bitter camps. It was all love at MSG for the former forever fam, possibly aided by the lack of any competitive resistance from the Raptors. 

Right as Randle and Barrett met on the floor postgame, MSG’s feed cut to a sponsored segment, the Audi Electrifying Play of the game, a decision that spoke to both the worst and the best of this organization. The worst: the most valuable franchise in the NBA, owned by a man born into billions long before he inherited the public trust who play at 33rd and 8th, is addicted to profit and no one with a voice at MSG recognizes the halo goes over the holy, not the hustle. This could easily be the most emotional regular-season game the Knicks play this season, and instead of staying with the moment everyone tuned in for — because of money the shareholders don’t remotely need — we got a sponsored replay. Imagine buying a ticket to this game and after the final buzzer, as you’re standing trying to see the players greet each other, some nudnik in front of you turns around and gets in your face hawking Audi. You’d punch them in the throat. No jury would convict you.

In some ways, the video cut is a microcosm of what this team is about and where it’s headed. There was some sentimentality, some of that buzz you get when you run into your ex, but the Knicks aren’t looking back (unless it’s with fondness regarding Bruce Brown, a Raptor who didn’t exactly run from the rumor that he could end up a Knick, too). Two years after I started at the university, I was promoted. There was a celebratory dinner for every professor in the College of Arts & Sciences promoted that year. I brought my then-fiancée. Seating was assigned at different tables; we were at one of the smaller ones, to my relief, just the two of us and my department head. And also, it’d soon turn out, my ex, the only other promotion from our department. Again: awkward.

We didn’t say a word to each other the entire dinner. When my partner and I got up to leave after, my ex made a point of rising, extending her hand and exaggeratedly introducing herself to me, the joke being since I hadn’t spoken to her the whole night, we might as well be strangers. I took her hand and played along. I’m sure we felt some of the same things that night, two people who’d once been a family forever shrinking into each other’s past. I’ll miss RJ and Quick. I’m not looking back, though.