The New York-Phoenix Parallel: How the Knicks and Suns took intersecting paths back to relevance
The Knicks and Suns both returned to the playoffs this year after long droughts… but are the two teams intrinsically linked through a series of shared players, coaches, and opportunities both missed and taken?
Question for you.
If one train leaves the playoffs in 2010, and another train traveling at the same speed leaves the postseason in 2013, which train reaches their destination first?
The answer: they meet in a head-on collision in 2021.
Leon Rose, Chris Paul, Elfrid Payton, Monty Williams, Devin Booker, Mikal Bridges, Jeff Hornacek; the list goes on and on.
What these names make up, is something completely theoretical, not factually proven by any scientists or analysts or even the madman Brock Aller himself.
It’s the freakin’ New York-Phoenix parallel, man.
Two teams, two rebuilds, two timelines.
And for whatever reason, they may be forever intertwined.
If you were to plot out the last half decade of Knicks and Suns basketball onto a graph, and drop a point in each and every place that they intersected… well, it’d look something like this:
Let’s begin.
It started in February of 2016, when the Phoenix Suns fired Jeff Hornacek. Just five months later, he took over as head coach of the New York Knicks.
His tenure with both teams could (and should) be described as underwhelming, shorthanded, inadequate, flat-out embarrassing. You get the point.
But what most don’t realize is that his transition from the Talking Stick Resort to the treasured halls of Madison Square Garden may have established a connection between two franchises.
And it still holds, to this day, nearly five years later.
With Hornacek in house, continuing to lay the seeds of one of basketball’s greater phenomena, executive Phil Jackson succumbed blindly to the force of the parallel at work back in 2017. As ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski tells it, he called the Phoenix Suns with an offer: Kristaps Porzingis for the fourth overall pick in the 2017 NBA Draft. They declined.
Presumably, one would hope he was targeting a point guard like De’Aaron Fox or Lonzo Ball. But the Suns opted to keep the pick, taking Josh Jackson fourth overall, and the Knicks were stuck with Porzingis for another three years before trading him to the Dallas Mavericks, seemingly resetting the rebuild once again.
The next major vertex would occur in 2018, on draft night, when the New York Knicks selected Kevin Knox II with the ninth overall selection. He’s failed to take the necessary strides on either end of the basketball to earn rotation minutes under any of his four head coaches.
But the Phoenix Suns, fresh off of a 21-61 season that saw them finish dead last in the Western Conference, traded their second first-round pick, the 16th overall selection of Zhaire Smith, along with a future first-round pick to the 76ers in exchange for the 10th pick, which had been used on Villanova wing Mikal Bridges.
It seems like a small thing, the possibility of a possibility, the what if question. But some people take that kind of data and run with it, almost as if it’s concrete information. And thus, the Knicks were laughed at (and are still being laughed at) for taking Knox instead of Bridges. (When, in fact, the best prospect out of that draft was passed on by both Phoenix and New York; Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.)
Moving on.
Look at the Knicks roster today. Scroll through Knicks Twitter. Read Knicks headlines.
Even after their first playoff series since 2013, you’ll find they all have one thing in common — point guard Elfrid Payton, who notably spent 19 games of the 2017-2018 season in Phoenix as result of a trade from the Magic, where he was drafted in 2014 by none other than Scott Perry, who reportedly might ink a new contract this summer to remain General Manager in New York.
Payton wasn’t brought back to Phoenix the following season, and instead spent the next year with the New Orleans Pelicans playing alongside Julius Randle. Both would leave the subsequent offseason and sign deals with the Knicks, and remain on the team to this day.
Fans can’t stand Payton, and as if routine, question his presence on a team filled with so much good day by day, hour by hour — hell, even minute by minute for the more “obsessed” bunch.
A straw came down and broke the camel’s back (finally) in Game 3, where Payton was benched in favor of former MVP and longtime Tom Thibodeau disciple Derrick Rose.
Was it too late? Is it possible that the Knicks without Payton could have managed to win one of the first three games, and not been facing elimination walking into Wednesday’s Game 5, but rather an opportunity to take the series lead?
Alas, we’ll never know.
But the New York-Phoenix Parallel lives on, stronger, because of Payton.
The elephant in the room is this: Randle and Payton share an agent in CAA’s Aaron Mintz.
And given President of Basketball Operations Leon Rose’s ties to the agency, it’s not hard to imagine the hush-hush conversations that may have occurred behind closed doors.
Speaking of the Creative Artists Agency, former employer of Leon, the Phoenix Suns today are led by two men represented by them in Devin Booker and Monty Williams.
The All-Star guard and head coach are also pieces in this tie, with the player often mentioned next to New York in trade rumors. Booker, drafted in 2015, made his playoff debut this year and just bounced LeBron James and the defending champion Lakers in the first round.
Take away the one game he played in and was injured to start 2015, and the same can be said for New York’s Julius Randle, drafted eighth in the 2014 NBA Draft.
Booker’s tenure in Phoenix hasn’t been a successful one, aside from this season. And the Suns are likely only headed to the playoffs now thanks to their offseason acquisition of Chris Paul.
Which reminds me, who was the other team considered a finalist for the Hall of Fame point guard’s services this year? Wasn’t it the New York Knicks?
It was.
If it weren’t for the COVID-19 pandemic, reportedly, Paul would have been suiting up in Madison Square Garden for all 72 games of the shortened season this year.
But he was always meant to be a sun of sorts, the point god. One that would bring blinding light to a franchise ready to break free of the storm clouds, and take the next step. On this side of the parallel, he’s just doing it for Phoenix, which, after going undefeated in the NBA’s bubble finish in Orlando, was primed possibly even more than New York to take the next step.
Paul’s close relationship with Leon Rose was a leading factor in the ultimately shorthanded push to get him into a Knicks uniform. But nevertheless, he opted to play for the Suns, whose head coach he was familiar with from his days back in New Orleans with the Hornets.
As mentioned, Williams is also represented by CAA, but in addition to that, he’s also considered the biggest threat to steal what is rightfully expected as Tom Thibodeau’s Coach of the Year award for the 2020-2021 season.
Williams was voted the Michael H. Goldberg Coach of the Year by his peers this season, which has only once not yielded the same result as the actual COY in the last four years. (Nick Nurse stole it from co-recipients Billy Donovan and Mike Budenholzer last year.)
Even with the Knicks’ playoff collapse, it seems Tom Thibodeau’s award to lose.
And the New York-Phoenix parallel continues on.
Even now, with the Knicks out of the playoffs and the Suns preparing for what looks to be a minimum second-round finish, the parallel is hard at work, laying the foundation for what will be headline(s) drawn between the two franchises.
Bleacher Report’s Eric Pincus reports that Paul’s services will be up for grabs once again. The 36-year-old is expected to decline his $44 million player option in search of one last payday, presumably in the three-year, $100 million range.
He doesn’t know it, but his decision will feed into the parallel, whether it’s to remain in Phoenix or head for the bright lights of New York. Or maybe there’s a third team, a dark horse, that swiftly surfaces from the shadows and steals Paul away with an even more lucrative offer, cementing themselves as a mutual enemy to New York and Phoenix fans alike.
What would that mean for Devin Booker? How would the guard view his front office’s inability to retain the one player that, after five long seasons, helped him to his first playoffs?
Trust that Leon Rose will be there, waiting to hear the word “disgruntled” used to describe his former client, with a number of draft picks and young talent at his disposal.
But only because the parallel wills it so.
Personnel aside, there’s a greater narrative here that revolves around the trajectory and recent success of both New York and Phoenix as well. This year is the first since the 2000-2001 season that both the Knicks and Suns are in the playoffs. How they got there is a story that can be traced along the parallel.
And no matter what happens (or in the Knicks’ case, happened) this postseason, with either of the Phoenix Suns or New York Knicks, the ties embedded between these two franchises will remain for the foreseeable future.
Because it’s not about how, or why, these two franchises are connected, but how substantial the connections are, and how close each major encounter was to tilting the current state of the Knicks or the Suns, for better or worse.
Whenever people talk about the 2018 NBA Draft, trust that Kevin Knox will come up, and by default a question of how Mikal Bridges slipped past New York to Phoenix.
If Chris Paul signs a new deal to remain with the Suns, and that’s what’s left of his NBA career, there will always be the question of “what if he had gone to the Knicks?”
Maybe at the office water cooler one day you hear someone talking about Payton. Yeah, you know of him. Drafted by the Orlando Magic, short stint in New York, shorter in Phoenix.
Jeff Hornacek? He was a certified bucket. Didn’t work out as a head coach, though. Spent his last years at the top of the bench with the Suns and then the Knicks. Remember the triangle?
Two teams, two rebuilds, two timelines.
It’s the freakin New York-Phoenix parallel, man.
