The 2024 Knicks Are The Best Knicks Team Since 1973: A scientific analysis
These Knicks are inspiring feelings that haven’t surfaced in decades for this fanbase. But is this team equipped to be the next truly great Knicks team?
Abstract
This study tests the hypothesis that the 2024 New York Knicks are the best Knick team since the 1973 edition, the last to win a championship.
Introduction
Like 1776 for Americans, 1973 is a year every Knick fan knows by heart, the year the Garden was Eden. Adam and Eve were expelled from the first garden; the Knicks, in their fourth Garden, know life after paradise lost all too well. After a half-century in the dark, any hint of sun stirs hopes and heartbeats. These days Knicks nation is all dreamy and light.
The current Knicks have won 15 of 17 games with an average margin of victory near 20. The two losses were each by four. The extent of their domination is enough to raise eyebrows; what makes it a spiritual awakening is its miraculous perseverence. Jalen Brunson, Julius Randle, OG Anunoby and Isaiah Hartenstein have each missed multiple games during the run, and yet the winning doesn’t stop. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after the top of the Eastern Conference, for as of now the Knicks are third and climbing the charts with a bullet.
The darkest hours of the post-Eden Knicks have been the false dawns – and there’ve been many. Eight, by my count:
1981: Red Holzman leads the Knicks to their first 50-win season since 1973. A year later they plummet to 33-49. Holzman retires.
1984: Bernard King explodes in the first of back-to-back All-NBA First Team seasons, leading the Knicks to within a win of the conference finals; their six playoff wins are their most in a postseason since 1973. A year later they plummet to 24-58; King destroys his knee in Kansas City.
1989: Rick Pitino’s Bomb Squad wins 52 games, the most by a Knick team since 1973, and get within two wins of the conference finals, after which Pitino leaves them for Kentucky. The next year they win fewer games in the season and the playoffs; the year after they’re so bad Patrick Ewing takes them to court in search of escape.
The Riley Era: For four years, Knicks fans are reminded that yes, tis better to have loved and lost than never loved at all, but also that getting dumped via a fax and igniting a holy war with your new flame against your old one will prove that some scars never heal.
The Van Gundy Era, I: Armed with cap space and three first-round picks, the 1996 Knicks signed Allan Houston and Chris Childs, traded one pseudo-power forward in Anthony Mason for another in Larry Johnson and used all three draft picks on more power forwards. The ‘97 season was stolen by P.J. Brown and David Stern, the ‘98 campaign by the pain of Patrick Ewing’s broken wrist. That was the end of the Oakley/Starks teams.
The Van Gundy Era, II: The Knicks turn Starks and Oakley into Latrell Sprewell and Marcus Camby, stumble through an abbreviated post-lockout regular season, then ride a magic postseason all the way to the Finals. A year later Ewing is traded; a little over a year after that, Van Gundy resigns. It’d be 11 years before the Knicks won another playoff series.
2013: The first post-Ewing team worth a damn won 54 games and finished second in the East. A year later they’d fired the general manager, made the Andrea Bargnani trade and dropped to 37 wins. It’d be nine years before the Knicks won another playoff series.
2021: The first post-Melo team worth a damn roared to a 16-4 finish and their best regular season since 2013 before crashing and burning in the playoffs. A year later they were a losing team, missed the entire postseason and their best player gave the home fans the thumbs down during a game, admitting it meant the crowd could go fornicate under the consent of the king themselves.
With this history and today’s Knicks streaking like a comet across our imaginations, I can’t just sit back and watch my fam get set up for another fall. Is this Knick run different somehow? Or more of the same heartbreak? Let’s see.
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