You want to know how bad things have gotten for the New York Knicks? Take a good look at the featured photo for this post. It’s a freaking pick and roll between Pablo Prigioni and Cole Aldrich!!! Welcome to New York Knicks basketball during the 2014-15 season! Woo hoo!
I could go a lot of different ways with this post. I could talk about the Knicks getting smacked in Los Angeles on New Year’s Eve with Phil Jackson — wait for it — ACTUALLY IN THE BUILDING. So much for any New Year’s resolutions they had in mind during pregame.
I could talk about the triumphant long-awaited begrudgingly boring return of Andrea Bargnani and wonder how Toronto was ever able to net a future first round pick from New York for his services.
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I could talk about the sad ballad of Carmelo Anthony, and how he could have had it all (gone to play with the Chicago Bulls this summer) but instead chose to take the money and ride things out with Phil and Derek Fisher. Now he finds himself on a 5-30 and is a near lock for a dejected comment to the media after each game:
“I don’t really like doing the New Year’s resolution, but I just want 2015 to be better than 2014. We’ve got to find a win. We can’t be thinking about the turnaround. We’ve got to find a win first and see what happens from there. It’s tough. Some days you’re able to do some things, some days you’re not. Some days it’s tough to even run around and cut and jump. And then other days I come in and I don’t really feel it.”
That comment alone makes it seem like the guy is walking around with a gigantic rain cloud over his head at all times.
Most of the media landscape has made them a punchline of some kind, even writers that share a deep sense of fandom towards them such as Grantland’s Jason Concepcion:
At this point it is getting harder and harder not to sit back and just laugh. Poor Jason Smith doesn’t know what the hell is going on during that possession. He probably isn’t used to touching the ball all too often.
I don’t know how Mike Breen and Clyde Frazier are getting through broadcasting these sad displays of basketball.
I joked last month that Breen should grill Frazier on what how the nightlife during his playing days in ’70s compares to the nightlife today, but never did I think that things would get so bad for New York that Breen may actually be considering going that route. Frazier should at the very least dedicate a whole halftime show to a story time type of feature about his many escapades.
People that sport this kind of fashion excellence are bound to have some epic stories from their glorious heydays.
I guess the moral from this post would be that I simply do not know anymore. What the Knicks are running on offense is not the triangle, and I cannot quite decipher what they are trying to achieve on the defensive end of the floor either. I wish I had some real basketball analysis for you guys, but sadly I do not.
All I know is that Carmelo Anthony is sad, Derek Fisher is due to have an unforgettable postgame rant to the media sooner or later and that J.R. Smith is bound to go off the deep end any minute now.
The Knicks drowned in their mediocrity for most of 2014 and 2015 looks like it is going to be much of the same barring some unforeseen change.