Maybe this Knicks team isn’t good enough to win a championship, or even make it back to the NBA Finals for the first time in more than a quarter-century. Maybe last spring, and the Eastern Conference finals, is as good as it gets for this group. But the players on this roster are the ones about to take their shot. And that happens to be the right way for this to play out, whether the Knicks ever had a legitimate shot at Giannis or not. They will ride with what they have.
The Knicks have won some games now with what they’ve got, eight in a row including the game of the year at the Garden, at least so far, double overtime against the Nuggets on Wednesday night. Things don’t get a lot easier, certainly not in the short run, before the All-Star Break, with the Pistons and the Celtics and the 76ers around what is supposed to be a soft place to land against the Pacers. But what we have seen in this streak is what were supposed to be the possibilities for this team.
“It felt like a playoff game,” Mitchell Robinson said after the Nuggets game.
Looked like one, too. But this was the kind of hardball balling the Knicks showed us last spring until they couldn’t make it past the Pacers in the Eastern Conference finals. This was the Knicks team that had its fans dancing in the streets. And it wasn’t just Jalen Brunson, as great as he was last spring and as great as he was against the Nuggets on his way to dropping 42 on them. It was all of them, the most appealing Knicks team since the 90s.
And you better believe that includes Karl-Anthony Towns, despite the way he’s heard it this season every time something has gone wrong. If you still can’t see how much Towns wants to win, and how hard he has been getting after it even when his shot isn’t falling, then you have been streaming the wrong movie. But then they’re all getting after it lately, passing the ball better, playing more defense, and showing the ability to take a punch the way they did even after Mikal Bridges committed that dumb off-the-ball foul at the end of the first overtime against Denver.
This is their team, the one Jimmy Dolan and Leon Rose decided was so ready to compete for a championship that they fired the coach – Tom Thibodeau, remember him? – who had taken them back to the conference finals for the first time since 2000 when Thibodeau’s old boss, Jeff Van Gundy, was still coaching the Knicks.
This is the team Rose has been building since he sat down in the big chair at the Garden; shaping it along with Thibodeau, who did the best work of his career before being kicked to the curb. Rose traded for Brunson and traded five No. 1 draft choices for Bridges to assemble this group, and made the trade for OG Anunoby, and made the deal for Towns with the Timberwolves even if it meant sending Julius Randle, who became a star here, and Donte DiVincenzo, to Minneapolis to get that one done. Good enough? We’re about to find out. But good enough to make a run.
The Knicks of the 90s – the one that brought the Garden back the way it did and twice went to the Finals – came as close as you can come to winning it all in ‘94, a 3-2 lead over the Rockets before going back to Houston and losing Games 6 and 7. Then the ’99 Knicks made a surprise run back to the Finals before running into a great Spurs team. It was still a great, heady time to be a Knicks fan. If you were around then, you know. But this is a great time to be a Knicks fan, as well. Try telling anybody at the Garden on Wednesday night, or last Sunday night against LeBron and them, that it’s not.
The fans like this team. And ought to like the fact that Rose – to whatever extent he kicked the tires on Giannis – didn’t try to play his own brand of hero ball with Giannis the way the Knicks once did with LeBron. Sometimes, even with the temptation to swing a Big Deal at the trade deadline, the team you start the season with doesn’t have to be some sort of first draft. You ride out the hard times, the way this Knicks team has done in the short run. Then let it ride.
I heard someone on television the other day say, “The Knicks have been there before.” Been where? Wait, they’re built better for this season than the Piston because they won that rock fight against the Pistons in six games last spring? Listen: Maybe when it’s all over in the regular season, the Knicks will be No. 1 in the conference the way they fully expected to be. Maybe they will beat the Pistons out of the top seed, and beat the Celtics again when the money is on the table.
As Aaron Boone, who knows a bit about falling short, always likes to say, “It’s all right there for them.”
But it really is. Mike Brown has his chance to prove Dolan and Rose right, and at least take the Knicks one round further than Thibodeau did, when his team never recovered from that crazy shot Tyrese Haliburton made in Game 1 of the conference finals. Maybe he can consistently play enough guys – including the new guy, a tough former Christ the King point guard like Jose Alvarado – that the Knicks are deep enough to come out of the East, at long last.
Pistons on Friday night, a chance for the Knicks to get their attention with a good slap. Good, long way to go after that. But for now the Knicks go with what they have. Good.
