The Knicks, moldy baguettes, and the difference between disappointment and disaster
Things have been bad so far this season for the Knicks. But are they disaster-level bad, or merely bump-in-the-road disappointments?
Pitchfork sales are through the roof. Rival Twitter factions and splintered sub-factions take turns saying mean things to each other. The digital vilification process revs its way towards maximum speed. Surely, amidst all this consternation, amidst all this failure, amidst all this angst — a reckoning soon cometh for the sputtering New York Knicks.
It’s Julius Randle’s fault! It’s Tom Thibodeau’s fault! It’s the people who say it’s Randle or Thibodeau’s fault's fault! It’s Leon Rose’s fault! It's Kemba Walker's fault! It’s Evan Fournier’s fault! It’s Frank Ntilikina’s fault! It’s France’s fault!
It’s pretty exhausting. Personally, I blame blame. If it wasn’t for blame, we wouldn’t be in this Spider-Man meme meets crying Jordan meme mess of a nightly weep-fest. Our tears would be private and slightly less righteous, our foolproof and fluffy strategical theories would be untested and therefore unravaged by the equally foolproof counter theory of the other fan with a keyboard. Maybe we should just ban the internet until the Knicks are above .500 again. Cut out the malevolent middle man, deprive our despair of its favorite arena. A sort of beheaded and muted hysteria. Yeah, muffled pain, that sounds nice.
Because we have to do something. Because there are few signs that this will get better and not worse. Because there are 44 games to go and I’d like as many of us to make it out of this season alive as possible.
The only alternative to the internet ban I can think of is to take a deep breath and admit that the Knicks are an average basketball team coached by an average basketball coach. To meditate daily on the difference between disappointment and disaster. To promise each other that we’ll run our catastrophized certainties through the definitional brown paper bag of this distinction the next time our blood pressure starts creeping towards oblivion.
I’ll get the ball rolling, with a few uncontroversial rounds of what I’m creatively calling:
“Knicks Disappointment or Knicks Disaster: It’s bad, but not THAT bad.”
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