Life of a Knicks Fan: The Future is Unclear

I’m writing this having just watched the condensed games against Indiana, Houston, and Philadelphia.

I came into the season with such optimism. Even though we missed on Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, I thought that we drafted well, picked up undervalued free agents, and had a chance for our head coach to put his stamp on the team, post-rebuild. We’re 60 games in now, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out this team’s identity or its future. Are we tanking for a high draft pick? Are we developing young talent? Are we playing veterans for an outside chance at the #8 seed? The uncertainty is making the team close to unwatchable—hence the condensed games. The New York Knicks have checked out, it seems, and while Mike Miller was once a revelation (and in my mind still deserves a real shot at a head coaching job) the organization accidentally revealing that he’s not in the running to be head coach next season has made the team less responsive to his coaching. There’s been an air of chaos over the team for the last 20 years that is difficult to see through as we made the transition from perennial contender to consistent bottom-feeder, and it doesn’t look to let up anytime soon. Uncertainty is the name of the game as we leave no stone unturned in search of a savior.

To correct this, we hired a replacement for Steve Mills. Leon Rose is on the way, and his tenure begins on March 1. Rose is the former head of CAA’s Sports Management division (read: an agent), and there is an increasing trend to put former agents in prominent front-office positions in various sports. Look at Arn Tellem as the Pistons’ vice-chairman, Rob Pelinka with the Lakers, and Brodie Van Wagenen with the Mets. I have a bit of hesitation toward this because Leon Rose comes with exactly as much front office experience as Phil Jackson. His primary qualification is—drumroll, please—his relationships with star players. That was David Fizdale’s significant qualification as well. Ask Mike Miller how that went. Rose may have been a terrific agent, but his primary purpose was getting players paid. How does that translate to building a successful team? Can he evaluate college talent ahead of the draft? Our greatest strength right now is our powerful draft position over the next four years. Can he leverage that into established stars or players we can develop? More importantly, he played a behind-the-scenes role previously. I didn’t know who he was or what he looked like. As the Knicks’ president, he will be very much in the spotlight, and the media and fans will eat him alive if he doesn’t deliver. The fans are especially ruthless, and every past GM and coach after Ernie Grunfeld and Jeff Van Gundy has had their firing publicly called for by fans on national TV.

The Knicks have taken another avenue to correct this: hiring an image consultant. Picking up on Kevin Durant saying that playing for the Knicks isn’t cool, James Dolan hired Steve Stoute to help rebrand the team and make it attractive to free agents.

On an aside, that’s incredibly short-sighted thinking. Winning is cool. When we won a lot, people wanted to come here. Now, no big stars want to play their prime in New York for a lousy team. It’s a sign as to how far removed we are from those years, and an indication as to how James Dolan hasn’t quite registered the passage of time, that instead of focusing squarely on the on-court product, he’s focused on branding.

Anyway, that’s beside the point.

In Steve Stoute’s first interview with ESPN, he revealed that keeping Mike Miller long term is not in the cards. The best-case scenario is he misspoke, and it was just a massive facepalm moment on live TV. The worst-case scenario—the one that seems to be playing out right now—is that he outed Mike Miller to the media and, more importantly, the team as a lame-duck head coach, and the team has since stopped responding to him. It’s still a facepalm moment, but a more destructive one as Miller is just running out the clock on the season. So, now that the cat’s out of the bag, who do we get to replace him?

Every report I’ve seen says that Tom Thibodeau will be the next head coach. Thibodeau is a CAA client, after all. And as far as choices go, it’s not a terrible one. He’s a hard-nosed coach who loves to preach defense. He learned alongside Pat Riley and Jeff Van Gundy during his time in New York. He was an assistant on Doc Rivers’ championship Celtics team. He’s proven himself as the coach of the Bulls when he had a young, healthy, and exciting core of Derrick Rose, Luol Deng, and Joakim Noah. After Chicago, however, he had inconsistent success with a Minnesota Timberwolves team that included Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Jimmy Butler. If he takes this job, Thibodeau inherits a rebuilding roster for a win-now fan base. We’re loaded with youth, but the last young player that Thibs coached into a superstar was Derrick Rose, and he was hurt most of that time. The current New York Knicks’ roster is nowhere near as seasoned, deep, or talented as the teams Thibodeau coached in Minnesota or Chicago. Add that to a shallow draft pool and a weak free-agent class, and it becomes much more challenging to get excited for next year.

Where do we go from here? What do we have to look forward to? Well, our weakness is our strength. We have young players and no idea what they can become. We’ve seen flashes of brilliance from RJ Barrett, some steady improvement from Mitchell Robinson and Frank Ntilikina, even moments where Dennis Smith, Jr. and Kevin Knox appeared to be the players we thought they would be. Maybe with the right guiding hand, some of the kids can develop into tradeable pieces or even stars in their own right.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’m delusional.

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