Update: comments were initially off by mistake! Fixed now.
The Knicks won the championship, and I want to just be happy about it. Part of me definitelyis happy for the long-suffering Knicks fans, certainly. (The ones who have long suffered.) I’m a neutral party and I got pretty annoyed by the weird and massive anti-OKC Thunder thing this postseason - I mean, no, they’re not my favorite to watch, but chill out - and was primed to enjoy seeing the young Spurs have to wait a little longer. There’s a version of this essay that’s pure joy, and the people who deserve to write it are the real fans, the ones who saw Patrick Ewing and Allan Houston and Carmelo Anthony come and go, the ones who suffered through the Isiah Thomas years, the ones who can tell you what Charles Oakley’s elbows did to the Bulls, especially the ones who have been waiting since 1973 with a patience that borders on the religious. To those people, this is your moment, you earned it. Go cry into your beer in the good way after crying into your beer in a bad way for so many years. You’ve got the receipts.
Of course, unless you’re part of the 1%, the odds that you have actual receipts for any beers bought at Madison Square Garden this postseason are exceedingly small. And that’s what has me so bummed out today, that the vision I can’t get out of my head isn’t some elderly Knicks diehard from Spanish Harlem finally enjoying his moment but Jimmy Fallow waving his arms, trying to get the camera to fall on him, because apparently being on TV every night for more than a decade just isn’t enough attention. Attending a Knicks home game against the Charlotte Hornets in February is absurdly expensive for the average family, and attending a playoff game anywhere, forget about it. Going to an NFL, NBA, or MLB game has long been expensive, but for regular fans and families, doing so a couple times a season was at least somewhat attainable. I could quote a thousand different statistics - a beer and a hotdog at So-Fi stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers, now go for $27 - but I don’t really have to. Everyone knows that live sports are too expensive for regular people now.
And so, yeah, seeing this all taken to ridiculous, symbol-heavy extremes in this series, with the Haim sisters (of Los Angeles) gyrating next to their billionaire friend Taylor Swift (of eastern Pennsylvania and Nashville), shamelessly demanding the attention that has already been given to them in massive amounts in their lives, while more anonymous billionaires just enjoy being where the action is by sitting in seats that cost more than a year at the most expensive universities in the world, while the broadcast cuts away to transplanted finance bros who bought a Knicks cap the week of the conference finals and now enjoy the playoffs over $30 cocktails in West Village velvet rope bars… yeah, it depresses me. I know some Knicks fans will think I’m just trying to undercut their moment. But of course New York the city is growing just as inaccessible as New York the basketball team, and neither political party has the slightest interest in ending the macroeconomic conditions that are exacerbating inequality in grotesque ways, and I’m afraid I have to point that out even today. Especially today.
The actual basketball wasdogshit, I guess I should say first. The quality of play in these playoffs and this championship series, and especially in the last game, was pretty atrocious. I mean, look at the shot charts for this series.
Woof.
The Spurs shot 41.8/33.9/75.6 for the series with 12.4 turnovers a game, the Knicks 42/36.7/76.9 and 13.2, which honestly are better than I would have expected from watching. There was brutally, brutally ugly play for much of this series, with the action frequently frenetic and disjointed; that the games were close with exciting comebacks doesn’t change that. But that’s just modern basketball. None ofmy many concerns with the contemporary NBA were assuaged by this series - with the gameplayed at an absurd pace and teams chucking threes relentlessly because that’s what’s “optimal,” a little bit of variance in shotmaking and luck and you end up with this kind of rim-clanging turnover-filled slop fest. Fast breaks are fun, and threes are fun when they’re one weapon in an arsenal of many, but I badly miss teams getting into sets and methodically working for the right shot. So much of the stretches of bad play in this series were a matter of the teams rushing for no reason, especially the Spurs, who looked awful, leaderless and afraid and stuck with a transcendent star who happens to have almost no shot-creating ability.
I’ve been saying for awhile now that Victor Wembanyama has no consistent offensive game to speak of; the kids would say that he has no “bag,” that he doesn’t have go-to moves, an offensive skillset. His high-scoring games feature a remarkably number of plays where he’s just taller than everyone and gracelessly plops the ball in the hoop with little resistance. The Knicks did an admirable job pushing him far away from the basket, leading to tons of rushed deep shots and 27.3% three-point shooting for the series. Everyone and their brother has said that he needs to live near the basket, many have responded that he can’t do that all game every game, everyone expects he will get better. Certainly gaining a little muscle will help. But his physical advantages are such that he hasn’t had to really develop offensive skills the way other players have, and that was apparent again and again this series, where he kept surrendering to quick, jerky pull-up jumpers against an undersized opponent. It was painful to watch.
Sloppy play and a remarkably easy road to the championship shouldn’t do anything to undermine the joy Knicks fans are feeling, obviously. All rings count. But the underwhelming play didn’t help with my problem this series, which is that I kept getting sucked back into the world of shithead celebrities and rich douchebags mugging for the cameras instead of watching the games. Somewhere in the middle of this sometimes-beautiful, often-shambolic, improbable Knicks run, ESPN started forcing us all to watch the Madison Square Garden elite instead of the game, and what I saw was a strange, sad diorama of everything that has happened to America and to New York City, a city and a country where no one expects anymore that good things are supposed to be available to ordinary people, where we barely even register that the rich have taken it all.