Word on the street is the Knicks are back. So now what?

Team building in the NBA isn’t an exact science, and so often it comes down to making just the right decisions at the right time. Do the Knicks and the Leon Rose-led front office have what it takes to avoid the Treadmill of Mediocrity and find their way to the Hot Tub of Champagne?

The New York Knicks are back. After writhing in agony, season after screaming season, on the Yoga Mat of Pain; after gazing up longingly at the narcotizing bliss of the Treadmill of Mediocrity; after looking back bitterly at the black-and-white memory of blue-and-orange relevance, haunted by lonely banners celebrating long-distant moments spent frolicking in the Hot Tub of Champagne — the Knickerbockers of New York are back to not being a terrible basketball team. 

Cheers to being back! Cheers to mediocrity! Cheers to winning streaks and All-NBA debates and playoff seeding implications! It’s just as good as we thought it would be, being up here on the Treadmill, not being down there on the Mat, with at least a clear line of sight to the Hot Tub. Although surely none of us figured it would involve quite so much Derrick Rose, quite so much Reggie Bullock, or quite so much of any of this season’s feel-good-again roster.

The last two weeks have been a giddy crescendo of righteous “are we back?” to “we are back!” and now “it really is nice to be back!” vibes. At some point in this fever dream of an eight-game-and-counting win streak, the Knicks banked perhaps their best win of the season, on the road against Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks, bookended by two more wins over Zion Williamson and the New Orleans Pelicans.

It’s been fun, temporarily gatecrashing the steady narrative ascent of two of the league’s hottest young superstars. Two players who have already reached first-name-only levels of hype: Zion and Luka. These names are the soundtrack of the NBA’s future, both destined for champagne-drenched tomorrows. Although, as the Knicks rudely reminded everyone this past week, their storybook endings aren’t set in stone just yet. Both franchise players’ franchises are already a cautionary tale of the perils and razor-thin margins of NBA team building.

The current iterations of the Mavericks and Pelicans are uncomfortably anchored to the limitations of the elephantine contracts of their respective second bananas. Kristaps Porzingis — more and more resembling a poor man’s Luke Kornet — is owed $94 million through 2024. Brandon Ingram — more and more resembling a deluded man’s Alec Burks — is owed $158 million through 2025. Both contracts make it very difficult to add star talent to each team’s roster, and neither player is good enough (or a good enough fit, in Ingram’s case, with his defensive limitations) on their own to be a championship-level Robin to their respective championship-level Batmen. 

Batmen without Robins don’t make it to the Hot-Tub, and Batmen who don’t make it to the land of expensive bubbles, in this golden age of player empowerment — don’t stick around for long.

It is much easier to go from bad to good, than it is from good to great in the NBA. This is a well-known truism of team building. But what the Pelicans and Mavericks rosters so brutally demonstrate, is that precisely how teams get from bad to good directly influences how difficult it is to get from good to great. It’s all very well making it to the Treadmill — but you damn well better have a flexible exit plan.

The Knicks and their fresh-faced and for-now-ballyhooed front office — Leon Rose, William Wesley, Brock Aller, and Walt Perrin — armed with an ocean of cap space and a well-stocked war chest of draft picks, are approaching some very important team building decisions, the success or failure of which will ripple and domino into the next crop of decisions a few years down the line.

Fans are already dutifully aligning themselves with their preferred summer upgrade. Can I interest you in the idea of Lonzo Ball? Two years of Kyle Lowry? Three years of Chris Paul after a hypothetical Phoenix Suns collapse and summer opt out? A Dennis Shroder-shaped consolation prize? All of these point guard upgrades would no doubt represent a gorging of low-hanging fruit for a team this season so often reduced down to the claustrophobic walls of Elfrid Payton’s game.

Maybe, though, with Derrick Rose and Tom Thibodeau re-igniting their decade-spanning bromance for the 247th time in their careers, the best long-term decision would be to run it back with Rose next season as the unflashy point guard upgrade already on the roster. He’d come at a cap-sheet-defining discount when weighed against the cost and annual commitment of sexier alternatives. And, crucially, none of those alternatives are Batman-level additions. The only Bat-card carrying and potentially available Batman this summer is Kawhi Leonard. 

Outside of jumping through all necessary hoops to land Kawhi, perhaps the smart strategy is to run this roster back with slight tweaks, lean into continuity — some of the fruits of which we are seeing already this season — and maintain flexibility moving forward.

Of course, the Pelicans’ and Mavericks’ team building predicaments differ from the long road the Knicks are staring down, in that those teams were looking to add a Robin to a Batman, and the Knicks are looking to add a Batman to multiple Robins. Maybe this does change the equation. The strategy of simply demonstrating competence in order to attract a star was part of the decision to hire Thibodeau in the first place, and it’s worked beautifully: these Knicks are dripping in competence. A two-year balloon payment for Lowry would be the on-court encore to hiring the infamous sideline Happy Man.

Maybe this would work. Maybe it wouldn’t. Roster construction is as much art as science. Self evaluation can be illusory for front offices marooned somewhere on the comfortable shores of being good, but not yet great. Every team thinks it can punch up a weight class until they’e seeing the wrong kind of stars. The 2018-19 Toronto Raptors are the rare Hot Tub team of the “demonstrate-competence-with-multiple-Robins” Batman acquisition strategy. But they are the exception. Most teams in the murky middle of the NBA pecking order wash up back where they started.

One potential factor in all this that we like to dismiss because of the times it hasn’t been a factor: New York City. Few teams have the geographical allure of the Big Apple. Whether any of us believes in the difference-making pull of the biggest big market doesn’t matter as much as what Leon and Wes believe. And neither man strikes me as a Treadmill kind of guy. If ever the franchise’s largest asset would actually matter, would be fully weaponized, would be more offseason fire than offseason flatulence: it would be on the mythical wings of World Wide Wes’ phonebook.

The bottom line: every decision in every stage of the team building process matters. Whether it’s the Raptors adding Kawhi Leonard or this season’s Hawks adding Danilo Gallinari. Because the reality is that the Gallinari deal — while not a championship-defining acquisition in the way the Leonard deal obviously was — obliterates the Hawks’ flexibility for the remaining two years of Gallo’s $60 million deal. It was a mistake. Teams with mistakes on their roster can’t compete for championships. Team building decisions made from the faux comfort of the Treadmill are fertile ground for multi-million-dollar mistakes. Thibs may have hauled the Knicks up off our blood-sweat-and-tears-soaked Yoga Mat, but expensive Roosters lurk in the shadows of every offseason.

This past week — in between gurning with joy at the Knicks’ league-leading streak of consecutive wins, to give my face a rest and to stop myself from entering a state of permanent catatonic rapture at supporting a team that is back — I watched what I thought would be a terrible movie. To dilute the hoops happiness some. 

It’s called The Edge Of Tomorrow. It stars Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. It’s about Tom saving humanity from a time-warping alien hive-mind thing. Given the cinematic limitations of this synopsis, it was actually pretty good. Kind of like a good Elfrid Payton game: enjoyable for what it is.

So in the middle of a big-ass battle on a French beach, Tom gets his face covered in a specific alien’s alien blood, and in the process gains the ability to relive that day over and over every time he dies, remembering everything as he tries again and again to kill the big bad alien brain-thing hanging out in Paris under the Louvre pulling all the alien strings. And even though he learns exactly what he has to do to save humanity, exactly how he needs to choreograph every step, with infinite attempts to perfect his strategy: he basically fails and ends up throwing a Hail Mary that — shockingly! — works. 

Despite this exquisite plot, terrible acting, and dozens of repeated scenes where Emily Blunt stares down the camera into the vault of my soul from the same toe-tingling yoga pose: my biggest takeaway from the movie is that it’s extremely difficult to win an NBA title. Ultimately, aliens — whether they’re murderous CGI wraith-machines or preposterously athletic NBA superstars — are quite difficult to beat. 

Even if you string together enough good decisions to get within sniffing distance of a Hollywood ending, a hundred variables that you have no control over have to go your way, so you — yes, I’m looking at you Leon, dedicated Strickland reader — better nail the stuff you can control. 

The Knickerbockers of New York are back to not being a terrible basketball team, and this is a wonderful thing. But if they ever want to hang a banner, if they ever want to really be back; the hard bit starts this summer. It starts with making the decisions that lead to the decisions that lead to the decisions that lead to bulk buying ski goggles in preparation for cannonballing into the Hot Tub of Champagne.

Or just never lose a basketball game again. That works too. Infinite win streaks are a pretty solid strategy.