The 2021 Knicks are the biggest, best surprise in Knicks history
The Knicks have been one of the more futile franchises in sport for a good chunk of their history — that means there’s been plenty of opportunities for the team to bounce back as well. Where does this Knick team rank in terms of feel-goodness?
The argument for which Knicks team is the G.O.A.T. pro’ly boils down to the only two championship teams in franchise history. Not only were the 1970 and 1973 teams the only two to go all the way, they won 60 and 57 games; only the 1993, 1994, and 1997 Knicks have won that many. But while New York has only won it all twice, they’ve had a number of pleasantly surprising seasons. This season is the 13th time the Knicks have improved by at least 10 games. But not all renaissances are created equally.
The first time the Knicks leveled up like that was 1953, but it wasn’t really all that much of an upswing. The year prior they lost in the Finals in seven games; in ‘53 they lost in five, for the same reason behind all six Finals losses in their history — the other team had the best big man in the series, e.g. Arnie Risen, George Mikan, Wilt Chamberlain, Hakeem Olajuwon and Tim Duncan.
After the 1968 Knicks posted the franchise’s first winning season in nine years, the 1969 Knicks leapt from 43 to 54 wins, good for the second-best winning percentage in team history to that point, behind only the ‘53 team. They were also the first Knick team since ‘53 to win a playoff series, sweeping Baltimore before losing 4-2 to Boston, including a pair of one-point heartbreakers. The Celtics would go on to win their 11th title in 13 seasons, but the Knicks had marked their arrival as contenders and would go on to win two of the next four championships.
Over their first 34 years of existence, the Knicks improved by 10-plus games just twice. Between 1981 and 2001, they’ve done so 11 times. The first came in 1981, when the team went from 39 to 50 wins after adding All-Star Campy Russell to a squad featuring Micheal Ray Richardson, Ray and Sly Williams and second-year center Bill Cartwright. They would drop to 33 wins a year later before sending Richardson and a fifth-round draft pick (that used to be a thing!) to Golden State for a native New Yorker and future Hall of Famer who would lead the ‘84 team to 44 wins and a postseason to remember.
At the end of the decade, the Knicks posted double-digit improvement in consecutive seasons, leaping from 24 wins in 1987 to 38 and then 52. Credit is due to Rick Pitino and the Bomb Squad, naturally. But like most of what the Knicks accomplished between 1985 and 2000 — hell, most of what the team has accomplished since 1973 — most of the credit belongs to one man.
Patrick Ewing would play an integral role in the Knicks’ next two quantum leaps. In 1991-92, Ewing, joined by newcomers Pat Riley, Xavier McDaniel, Anthony Mason, and holdover John Starks in his first full-time gig, led New York from 39 wins and a first-round sweep vs. Chicago to 51 wins, a first-round conquest over the Bad Boy Pistons and a seven-game slugfest with those same Bulls. Ewing tied a career-best by finishing fourth in MVP voting that year.
In the summer of ‘96, the Knicks reloaded, trading Mase for Larry Johnson and signing a new backcourt with Allan Houston and Chris Childs. Most of our memories of the ‘97 season end in the same bad place, so let’s remind you of just how good that team was before they were robbed of potential destiny by P.J. Brown and David Stern.
It’d be another decade before a Knick team improved so dramatically, and that was more math than meaningfulness. The 2007 Knicks won 33 games, 10 more than the year before, but really that just took them from historically lousy to run-of-the-mill bad. The next meaningful leap came four years later, when the team added Amar’e Stoudemire, Raymond Felton, Landry Fields, Timofey Mozgov, and then Chauncey Billups and someone else you may remember en route from 29 wins to 42.
The 2013 Knicks were basically The Expendables: a bunch of oldheads looking to show the world they still got it. And they did, though for all the wonder and wondrousness of that year, it’s worth pointing out they only qualify for this article on a technicality. They did win 18 more games than the year before, but that’s exaggerated by the 2012 season being lockout-shortened. Adjust New York’s 36-30 that season to a full-season mark and they would have won 45 games, meaning “only” a nine-game jump to the 54 they won a year later. Still. Joy is joy and that year was such joy.
In 2015, the Knicks set a then-franchise worst with 17 wins, one they tied four years later. 2016 saw the return of a healthy Carmelo Anthony, the debut of rookie Kristaps Porziņģis, and a jump up to 32 wins. It doesn’t always feel like that big a leap in retrospect, probably because they started 22-22 before stumbling to a 10-28 finish that saw second-year coach Derek Fisher canned.
That ‘16 season saw an 18% improvement in their winning percentage, which was a franchise record until this year. It’s hard to pro-rate and project last year’s 65-game record against this year’s 72 when we’re used to working with an 82-game base. So to simplify, I’m looking at winning percentage, and this year’s Knicks are up a whopping 24% after Sunday’s win at the Clippers. I keep running out of words and ideas when I recap, because after 30-plus years as a fan and six as someone who writes about them, I don’t know how to make sense of what I’m seeing this season. It doesn’t just feel unprecedented. It is.
This isn’t a Finals team going from good to great. This isn’t an obvious Hall of Fame coach and player lifting a club up out of mediocrity. This isn’t a contender quickly rebuilding on the fly. The Knicks were 38-110 the past two seasons. They’e 38-30 now. They could lose 79 games in a row and still be ahead of their pace from 2018-2020.
And the turnaround is all thanks to an MVP candidate many fans would have happily traded for a bagel with a schmear six months ago, a player not old enough to drink improving so improbably as a shooter it’s unlocked all sorts cathedral ceiling fantasies, a former MVP and Knick disappointment who deserves Sixth Man of the Year votes, a trio of centers combining to earn less than DeAndre Jordan and a head coach who was fired by one of sport’s worst franchises. All that while their lottery pick ranks just 26th among his draft class in minutes played. None of this computes. This has literally never happened before with this team. Can you dig it? This has literally never happened before!
Don’t take it for granted, either. There’s reason to hope this time around is the start of something good, but what goes up usually comes down, and these Knick turnarounds are generally followed by downturns. The only two times they were better two years after one of these renaissance years were 1994 and 2013. Every other one of these seasons soon resulted in drops, some minor — the ‘09 team was only a game worse than ‘07 — and some major — the ‘15 team won 33 games less than ‘13 did.
So when you feel like getting hyped, get hyped. This is either the start of a golden age or a brief blip of bliss before yet another early, endless winter. Either way, as always, appreciate what you have while you have it.
