A Reason to Believe

The New York Knicks were eliminated from playoff contention a couple of weeks ago.

That is a sentence I’ve avoided writing for a several days as I’ve gathered my thoughts about it. The diehard Knicks fan in me is thoroughly disappointed. A first-round exit is a tough pill to swallow and can easily make the fanbase wonder if their miracle season was a fluke.

The person in me who has watched and played basketball since he was 11, though, thinks a little differently. As much as Knicks fans—or Knicks haters, even—will say that the team’s improvement is smoke and mirrors based on 5 games in late May/early June, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. First of all, this is a team that’s still technically rebuilding. The first part of the process is assessing what you have, what to keep, what to dump, and what to acquire. I think that we’ve sorted our team into Keepers, Dead Weight, and Maybes. I’ll go into that later on in this post. The second thig to keep in mind is that this squad rolled into the season six weeks after the end of the last season. There was no preseason, no training camp, no Summer League for the rookies and end-of-bench guys. Lastly, it’s worth keeping mind that teams don’t go from worst to first without a significant overhaul of their roster. The Knicks largely ran it back with the guys from last year—plus two rookies, minus three veterans.

So back to the first thing, it’s not a stretch to say that several players on the roster outperformed the league’s expectations. Julius Randle turned himself into an All-Star. RJ Barrett showed more sustained glimpses of his ceiling. Mitchell Robinson showed up as a defensive monster before he got hurt. Reggie Bullock gave us some much-needed perimeter defense. As far as keepers, Randle, Barrett, Derrick Rose, Immanuel Quickley and Obi Toppin are mostly untouchable. Mitch Robinson is a maybe, along with Reggie Bullock, Nerlens Noel and Alec Burks. Dead weight includes Elfrid Payton, Kevin Knox, and Frank Ntilikina. So now that we’ve assessed our roster, it’s clear we need a starting point guard and a reliable scoring center. In my head, a guy like Spencer Dinwiddie comes up at the point, and maybe a John Collins as a scoring big man. Maybe we get lucky again in the draft. I don’t know what the team will do, but there are at least viable places to start.

What the Knicks did this season is remarkable, despite how sour the ending is. It earned Julius Randle a Most Improved Player award and got the new coach Tom Thibodeau a Coach of the Year. The foundation is there, and I think that after nearly a decade of being the laughingstock of the league, the Knicks have given the fans reason to hope again.

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We’ll see you at the Draft.