On De'Aaron Fox and the greatest positional fetish in the NBA
Approaching another trade deadline, Knicks fans once again find themselves fantasizing about players that play the one position the team has never been able to get right — point guard. Could naysayers of a potential De’Aaron Fox deal be getting a little too far into the mud with stats?
Here’s a twisted definition of you and of me: Person who thinks endlessly about point guards that aren’t on the New York Knicks.
This is one of the varied sunless psychological torments that fuels our fandom. You know, that way your heart sinks into the soles of your shoes when you think about how you used to think about Kemba Walker, all five of those months ago. It’s truly relentless, this thing: our franchise's own organizational dark matter; an episode of Black Mirror sponsored by Bing Bong; a cursed and bottomless want that never ends — and this trade deadline is powerless to resist it.
Our latest shiny saviors are here: Jalen Brunson of the CAA-Knicks bloodline and De’Aaron Fox of the Knicktucky uber-reunion.
Welcome, imperfect pretenders, brave champions of slightly different sources of supposed nepotism, to the greatest positional fetish in the NBA.
You see, once a professional point guard has been held up as a Knicks possibility, they join a bloated alumnus of players that almost — but didn’t — play for the 'Bockers. It’s basically half the Association's population at this point. Photoshopped, but not forgotten. No team in the league has been linked with more players of a certain position than the Knicks have with point guards. Of course, I can’t (read: don’t have the time or ability to) prove this, but it’s a logical byproduct of having the longest active streak of positional stink in the league.
The list of NBA point guards that Knick fans intimately know is testament to the ruminative definition of #ThisFanbase above.
Malachi Flynn, Tre Jones, Sharife Cooper: yes, sweet child, we have opinions.
DJ Augustin, Cam Payne, Kendrick Nunn: what would you like to know?
Fred VanVleet, Lonzo Ball, Kyle Lowry: ah, those innocent summer possibilities.
These days, because of the interweb's ability to manufacture and microwave a tweetable verdict on any given player, the process for fans of forming an opinion on a guy they don't watch week in and week out is dangerously sped up. The second this happens, the digital joust begins, and newborn takes only get more and more entrenched. So today I want to talk about De'Aaron Fox and his unique early-career context, because it's all too easy to overvalue the thread-friendly surface statistics at the expense of the more slippery stuff that resists quantification; stuff like having three head coaches, two GMs, and a pandemic to navigate in your first five NBA seasons.
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