Do New York Knicks Have the Toughest Rebuild in the NBA?
From the moment Phil Jackson was hired last March, you could forgive fans of the New York Knicks for believing in the rebuild to come. Between the full-circle poetry of a Zen Master’s swansong and the Knicks’ own four-decade championship drought, the whole thing just felt right—like a sun-soaked beach after a storm.
Thirty-one losses later, the specter of the Master’s plan has taken on a whole new tone: Should Jackson make good on his goal of a third banner in the Garden rafters, it would be one of the most unlikely and unprecedented about-faces in NBA history.
Everyone knew the Knicks would be inconsistent, the process painful, the postseason far from guaranteed.
A 5-31 record with no fewer than four starters on the mend—Carmelo Anthony included—and an offense that makes your Y-league team look like the Harlem Globetrotters? Only the most cynical of cynics sat on that side of the spectrum.
The status of Anthony, whom Jackson lavished with a fresh five-year, $124 million tender this summer, further complicates matters. The hope, of course, is that Anthony’s ailing knee can be healed with minimum invasiveness. At which point all the worries will, at least temporarily, be moot.
But the outcome looms large, particularly as it concerns New York’s much-anticipated foray into 2015 free agency and the requisite courting of players like Marc Gasol, Wesley Matthews, Goran Dragic, Greg Monroe and others.
Why, after all, would one bet the prime years of his career on a 30-year-old scorer with bum wheels and whatever spare parts Jackson might mine from the scrapheap?
In his typical brunt brogue, the New York Times’ Harvey Araton summed it up thusly:
"That process would be mitigated by the addition of a premier free agent to partner with Anthony, using the salary-cap space the Knicks will have. But as Jackson admitted Monday, he correctly worries about how the developing season’s disaster is making the Knicks an unattractive option to potential free agents like LaMarcus Aldridge and Marc Gasol.
Reports of turmoil, dissatisfaction with the triangle and Anthony’s involvement as one of the perpetrators and not a problem-solver cannot help. On top of that, the notion of big-time players lining up to join a 31-year-old Anthony while taking less money from the Knicks than their current teams could offer has always seemed an imaginative stretch.
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Jackson’s abilities as a motivator are more than well noted. At the same time, this isn’t the simple book-club psychology he’s parlayed in seasons past; he’s going to have to sell these players on something much more concrete than mere poems and koans—a vision not of today’s plays or tomorrow’s game but of the whole scope of their NBA future.
From a practical win-loss perspective, the paradox is a vexing one: Shut Melo down and lose out, you give yourself a much better shot at landing the kind of lottery game-changer who could tip the free-agent scales in your favor.
On the other hand, tank too hard, there’s a chance not even “the next Tim Duncan” will be enough to ignore the forest for the trees.
Should Anthony stubbornly suffer through the rest of the season, the Knicks risk the worst of both worlds: a hardly needle-moving pick and one road-weary star closer than ever to career nadir.
Let’s assume, for sake of argument, that the Knicks both strike lottery gold—Duke’s Jahlil Okafor or point guard sensation Emmanuel Mudiay, we’ll say—and attract a first-rate free agent or two. That still leaves the matter of rounding out a roster slated to shed all but five players next summer (six if you include Iman Shumpert).
To say that calls for a creative calculus would be an understatement; space stations have sailed by simpler math. As teams like the Philadelphia 76ers and Orlando Magic are out to prove, assets are king in today's NBA. And aside from the on-the-town clout and imagined cultural cachet, the Knicks don't have many.
But let’s grant Jackson the doubt’s benefit again and posit the Knicks arrive to training camp next September purpose-built for a banner run. That still leaves the minor matter of actually doing it—by the hand of a 41-year-old first-time head coach, no less.
You can almost hear the margin for error becoming subatomic.
This hardwood high-wire act is why James Dolan is paying Jackson upward of $12 million per year, of course. After almost 20 years of increasing futility, the notoriously stubborn Knicks owner will do everything in his power to prove his tenure a fruitful one. However stretched the purse, no matter Jackson’s mantras, whatever the timetable.
Judging by remarks Jackson made during a preseason interview with the New York Daily News’ Frank Isola—well before the failure reached its current fever pitch—even he realizes this is no overnight affair:
"It’s a step-by-step process. Usually teams come into the playoffs, learn from being in the playoffs and gradually assume capabilities of carrying out the championship. We still have to kind of come together in a bonding way that creates trust, teamwork, identity, some things like that. So we’re about going through this process and enjoying the process and the journey that we go through. We believe that we’re going to be a playoff team and then we don’t know how far we’ll be able to go. We’re hoping for the best.
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Perhaps Jackson sees in Anthony a means to a far more distant end. Perhaps he really is in it for the long haul, some 10-year master plan hidden behind a third eye. Perhaps this rebuild will be one where razing trumps re-jiggering, where patience and prudence—hardly hallmarks of the New York sports fan—are sewn with truly sustainable seeds, such that the reaped rewards might be more thoroughly enjoyed.
More preciously, perhaps the Zen Master knew outright the futile windmill at which he was tilting. That true career fulfillment somehow lies not in going out on the most poetic peak but crawling, complex legacy and all, through humility’s dog door. All the while daring us to square the 13 rings with one failed high-wire wager.
All these things are possible. And anyway, what is being a Knicks fan without having to bow to that very idol?
Jackson never promised fans a championship. But he’s also smart enough to know that his rafter-rapturous aura means they’ll expect one—and sooner, rather than later.
That he embraced the degree of difficulty for what it was, though, might tell us more than any 11 rings ever could about what truly drives this twilight sinking sage: manning the impossible mountain not for some imagined magical air, but because it's there.
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