Reflecting on the last Knicks opening night, one long year later

Exactly one year ago today, on the 23rd of October 2019, the New York Knicks kicked off their season with a 120-111 opening night loss to the San Antonio Spurs. It’s a complicated anniversary. A tensed and tight knot of feelings. This anniversary — of that Knicks team, of basketball, of fans, of games, of fans at games pre mass-chaos — is the equivalent of the emotional waterfall when laughter turns into tears, when all of the sudden an innocent disbelieving laugh tumbles into a torrent of liquid feelings. The moment when hindsight meets nostalgia meets the absurd reality of this lap around the sun.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Really, it’s very effective. The ability to look back at events with the knowledge of their eventual ripples and endgames. It’s 20/20, as the saying goes: perfect after-the-fact visual acuity. But 2020 the year slaps 20/20 hindsight square in the jaw. How we should feel about the Knicks of a year ago is muddied by the fact that we should, by rights, by the rhythms of reality as it once always was, be watching the Knicks again — now, on the 23rd of October, in this sorry excuse of a year, 2020.

A year ago, David Fizdale was our fearless leader, and head coach David Fizdale was in midseason form as far as Fizdalian tactical tomfoolery, as his quirky starting five lined up against the Spurs, with rookie wing RJ Barrett starting at point guard, alongside promising second-year isolation specialist Allonzo Trier. It was a duo of, shall we say, questionable distributional chops. It’s worth noting that Elfrid Payton, Frank Ntilikina, and Dennis Smith Jr. were all on the bench, all available, all point guards.

It was for the most part a competitive game, and we — ha-ha-ha, blinded by the allure of a close game and rookie Rowan dropping 21 points on 69% shooting whilst playing point guard in his NBA debut — brushed off Fizdale’s bizarro lineup as a one-off. LOL, us. This one game, one starting lineup, one blunder, actually sums up Fizdale’s season and shortfalls and eventual firing perfectly. He did dumb stuff. He was a consistent doer of dumb stuff, wearing expensive glasses and a practiced smile. With hindsight, we know this. And he’s no longer in the employ of the Knicks, or any NBA team, or even in any rumors of any of the many head coaching vacancies this offseason. Funny, that. 

It is funny to look back at our one-year-younger selves, innocent and naive, trying to rationalize the always weird and rarely wonderful strategic guffaws of Mr. Fizdale. Bless us. We don’t have to do that anymore, and that’s objectively a good thing, something to chuckle over, knowingly. But then, we could also benefit — emotionally, psychologically, spiritually — from RJ Barrett in an NBA game right now. Play him at center for all I care. Play him 48 minutes. Just give him a basketball, a lump of inflated orange leather, in front of happy shouting people, standing shoulder to shoulder, oblivious to anything but the outcome of Knicks-Spurs. 

David Fizdale’s patented blunders and RJ Barrett’s debut blinders: laughter and tears. 

In fact, whilst we’re on the topic of impressive debuts and strategic blunders… Julius Randle had 25 points, 11 rebounds, six assists, three steals, and only one turnover on 56% shooting against the Spurs. Who needs Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, or Kristaps Porzingis when you have such an efficient and versatile and dominating wrecking ball on the roster! Or so we thought. We basked in Randle’s debut, dared to dream of eight seeds and upsets, marveled at the value of $63 million for three years. Well, chuckle-chuckle, it didn’t, ha-ha, quite work out. He had one or fewer turnovers 11 other times over the season. Three or more steals three other times. Six or more assists five other times. Shot better than 56% eight other times. 

That really may have been Randle’s best all-around performance of the season, his debut against the Spurs, a long year ago. Now — a 66-game season, a pandemic, and a bubble postseason later — his future as a Knick is up in the air, with reports that moving him before he gets a second chance in his second season in the Big Apple is the organization’s “number one priority” this offseason. With hindsight, we know this makes sense. Sense in alleviating the team’s phone-box spacing, to pave the way for a more RJ-centric offense, and to unleash the lab-made athleticism of Mitchell Robinson. How silly we were not to see sense last summer, before the spin moves and isolations and turnovers. 

Maybe it was a silly signing, but right now, one year on, I’d kill for some Julius Randle in my locked down life. Give me Julius on the wing, jabbing a pre-determined jab step at a thicket of three, four, five defensive bodies patiently waiting in the paint. Give me the left-to-right spin that sometimes ends in points, but most times just ends the possession. Give me numerous Knicks on the perimeter, pleading for a pass, palms poised and ready, in acres of space, unseen and unused. I miss all this agony, and to be fair, I of course miss the games when Randle looked like the Randle we thought we were getting — all uncompromising straight lines and flicking away defensive bodies like flies — because those games happened (sporadically) too.

A lot has changed for the Knicks in a year. Fizdale, Steve Mills, Trier and Marcus Morris are gone. The front office has been replenished. The coaching staff has been remodeled. And the rest of the roster may well be teetering on the precipice of a thorough reshuffling. In that sense, it’s a happy anniversary — with the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to argue that the organization as a whole isn’t better off now than it was on opening night a year ago.

One thing that hasn’t changed, though, are the fans. Knick fans miss the Knicks. Basketball fans miss basketball. This won’t change. Maybe that’s the main lesson of this anniversary: the size of the Knicks-shaped hole in the calendar, the weight of the absence of all the usual hopes and butterflies of opening night. It’s testament to the depth of the psychological roots of our shared obsession, that after a season of bitching and moaning about spin moves and botched rotations and ownership buffoonery, we just want our Knicks back — warts and all.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, as is the marrow-deep knowledge that we’re fundamentally better off without Fizdale and Mills, or the tentative optimism that solid foundations are at last being laid; but none of that is even in the vicinity of the fullness of wonder that will come with the eventual return of Knicks basketball. We’ll get it back, at some point, and when we do, we’d do well to remember just how much we missed it — all of it — when it was gone.