Four lines of intersecting thoughts on the Knicks entering the All-Star break

Two teams playing their best ball in years faced off last night in Orlando. To no one’s surprise, the healthier team, the Magic, came away with the 118-100 win over the leper-colony Knicks. There’s a betting chance these two end up meeting in the playoffs. If they do, the Knicks may feel like they’re looking in a mirror – a funhouse mirror, perhaps. But sometimes distortion brings clarity. Everything the Magic aren’t speaks to what the Knicks are, or can be. With an asterisk. An asterisk can be drawn with four intersecting lines. So can last night’s game and the first “half” of this season.

May the 4 be with you – ASAP

Julius Randle has missed the Knicks’ last nine games, during which they’re 4-5. Paolo Banchero hasn’t missed a single game for the Magic. After the Knicks exploded for 36 first-quarter points to lead by nine, Banchero only played a little more than half the second, yet similarly to James Dean, Selena and George Santos, reminded us it’s not how long you’re in the limelight that matters, but what you do while there. Banchero, still just 21, poured in 13 on 5-of-6 shooting, including three threes, to take Orlando from down nine entering the frame to up 10 after it. Northern Florida’s All-Star made 15 baskets, as many as the entire Knick frontcourt combined, i.e. Precious Achiuwa, Jericho Sims, Jacob Toppin, Taj Gibson and Charlie Brown.

The Knicks are missing a ton of skilled size right now, what with their four horsemen of Randle, OG Anunoby, Mitchell Robinson and Isaiah Hartenstein all M.I.A. Their last game before acquiring OG was another loss in Orlando, a game where Banchero and Goga Bitadze’s massivity was too much to handle. The playoffs are a lot like life: nobody’s interested in your plans or potential, just what you can do in the present. The All-Star break is probably coming at the perfect time for New York, trapped as they are in a Sisphyean nightmare where they’re too shorthanded to compete, leading more and more players to play too many minutes, thereby increasing their chances of injury and of leaving the Knicks even more shorthanded. One must imagine Thibodeau happy. 

Some of you lot wanna blame it all on the head coach, and believe me, I get that urge – I have a little Daddy kink, too. It can be hot to project that everything that’s happening is due to one dude up top. But when you create a culture like the Knicks have, where alllllll your guys have “that dog” in them, it’s not just about the coach. When Josh Hart is grabbing his knee while jogging up the court, or Donte DiVincenzo’s clutching at his calf, we laud their toughness, an old-fashioned and out-of-touch gendered way to interpret such acts. It’s like telling someone you know you love them because you’d die for them. Why not live for them instead? Willis Reed is a legend because he wouldn’t miss the most important game in franchise history; he retired way too young because of all the lesser games he still posted up for.

The Knicks are potentially a deep and loaded team. But if everyone keeps tripping over themselves to show the world how tough and uncompromising they can be, they’re gonna fall short of the heights they could have reached. Josh Hart talked recently about how Thibs has cut down on practice time given the injury spate. That might help a bit, but we always hear you can’t replicate the intensity of game-day in practice. Somewhere, someone in this organization is hopefully the adult in the room. Otherwise they run the risk of meeting a healthier team come the postseason, and instead of playing into the second round, end up playing the “If only” blues.

My kingdom for a guard

After Randle dislocated his shoulder, I wondered how Jalen Brunson would fare. With the only other All-Star on the roster out weeks, if not months, you figured defenses would adjust and Brunson would struggle. Defenses did, but Brunson didn’t, averaging 32.5 points on 50% shooting since Randle was lost. It’s yet another variation on a theme that’s been playing since he signed with the Knicks two summers ago: Brunson changes everything.

The Magic would leap from a cute young team to a pinstriped menace if they had a lead guard like Brunson. While they’ve had success building a young frontcourt of Banchero, Franz Wagner and Wendell Carter Jr., along with several intriguing secondary guards like Jalen Suggs, Cole Anthony, Markelle Fultz and Anthony Black, Orlando as a franchise has been chasing that dragon for years. In fact, in their entire history, only two Magic guards have ever been All-Stars: Penny Hardaway and Jameer Nelson. Banchero was six years old the last time that happened. If they go another few years without ending that drought, bet your Disney dollars Banchero will be the latest Orlando star to be scapegoated by their fanbase when his eyes begin to wander to other teams. If Trae Young ends up joining the fray, the New York/Orlando rivalry that flared for a couple years in the mid-1990s before flaming out will be back in full effect.

Can’t believe what you’re seeing? Then you’re seeing just fine

From January 1st through February 1st, the Knicks gave up 113+ points only once, going 15-2. In six games since, they’ve allowed that many five times, dropping five of six. Parse the numbers all you want, but then again . . . don’t? Because right now watching the Knicks is like watching a family member react badly to medication, like the time my grandmother had her knee replaced and her meds led her to believe she was in a telenovela where the nurses were trying to kill her. Ever seen an octogenarian wake up after knee surgery and try to fight their way out of their hospital bed and run away? The sight is jarring, but you have to remember it’s not really them. 

Sims played 39 minutes last night. That ties his career-high, a mark he hit only once, in the final game of the less-than-fondly-remembered 2022 season. From December 18th to January 18th this season, he played a total of 15 minutes. Jericho Sims is a basketball spork that the Knicks are being forced to use at formal dinners because there’s literally no other silverware. This is a weird, somewhat pointless stretch of time under Thibs, one that – while not at all the same – reminds of of late last season. I clarify because some of you get off on thinking “similar” means “exactly 100% precisely the same,” which no. Just no.

Late last year, it was obvious for about a month that the Knicks were going to play the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs. They weren’t going to pass the Cavs for the 4-seed and they weren’t gonna fall to the 6-seed. The vibes were way better then than now, but there were similarities. Randle was hurt. The team’s best feel in years was weighed against the uncertainty of what they’d look like come playoff time. The last few weeks of the season had this ambient trapped-in-amber feel, like all of existence was a slow drip toward a future that felt light years away.

This season the seeding isn’t nearly so set in stone, yet there’s something familiar about weeks passing by while trying not to react – much less overreact – to what we’re seeing. Hopefully the injuries this season came early enough that the Knicks’ chief concern between now and mid-April is getting people back and into game shape, and not whether Sims is ready to play 40 minutes against Jarrett Allen or Brook Lopez. 

Heaven help us

New York has seven days off until they return to action, at which point they’ll face a bit of a six-game humdinger: at Philadelphia, a four-game homestand against Boston, Detroit (the Quentin Grimes revenge game!), New Orleans and Golden State, followed by a trip to Cleveland. After that there’s another four-game homestand against Atlanta, Orlando and Philly twice, followed by the first of two four-game road trips to come. It may not be the gauntlet they ran the first month of the season, but neither is it a cakewalk. If ball is life, treat it the same way: all one can do is pray for health, and luck, and any sense of justice.

The Celtics rule the East’s roost, as they have most of the past 70 years, as sure an indictment of the backwardsness of entrenched power as any. The Cavs are second, thanks in large part to the play of an employee who was 21 when he entered the NBA, has been stuck for seven years in two places he never wanted to live and who when he does will be burned in effigy by the same fans currently chanting “M-V-P” at him. The Bucks are led by a cornball international who makes Enes Kanter’s faux sincerity believable. The Knicks are the good porridge. The right mattress. The good guys.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Matthew. Lend us a hand, Lord. Let this be the Knicks’ year. Even if it comes with an asterisk.