july 8–21, 2019 | new york 9scendent, and besides, why else would any-
one be interested in the Knicks? It’s the
league’s most valuable franchise, but from
a basketball perspective, the Nets are
unquestionably the healthier place for Du-
rant and Irving. The Nets have more talent
on their roster, a more stable front office, no
office parties where everyone has to pretend
their boss’s band doesn’t make their ears
bleed. And yet they don’t have nearly the
platform the Knicks do. Last season, the
Nets had a fun, exciting playoff team that
was homegrown and invested in teamwork
and a positive team culture; the Knicks
were a horrible team that was actively try-
ing to lose games. Nonetheless: The Knicks
still outdrew the Nets by 4,000 fans per
game. The average Knicks ticket on resale
sites was around $285 with fees; you could
get into Barclays Center for a playoff game
for less than that and for a regular-season
game for about $25. If you’ve ever been to a
Knicks game at Barclays, the crowd is still
a majority-Knicks-fan crowd; if anything, a
trip across the bridge is the cheapest, easiest
opportunity many Knicks fans will have to
see their team play in person. And when the
Knicks host the Nets? Please. They might as
well be hosting Sacramento or Memphis.
But Durant and Irving are making a bet
that they can change all that. So—how
much can these two signings change the
underlying dynamic of the city? I don’t
think all that much, actually. To begin with,
isn’t this still a Knicks town? Won’t it always
be? The Los Angeles Lakers have been run
nearly as poorly as the Knicks in recent
years, but they still got LeBron James and
Anthony Davis, two of the game’s best five
players, to join up. The Nets had to do
everything exactly right, and even that
required the Knicks to be as bad as they are,
and owned by who they are, to earn the
edge. And I bet it’ll still be tougher for a fan
to get into MSG than Barclays over the nextfew years. The Knicks are too wound into
the fabric of the city. Spike Lee and Samuel
L. Jackson were talking about the Knicks at
the Oscars this year. The Nets have no such
capital. What does it mean to be a Brooklyn
Nets fan? A Knicks title would cause grown
men to weep in the street. Who cries over
a Brooklyn Nets championship? The origi-
nal investors in the property?
And then there’s the actual basketball.
Durant will miss all of next season, and
when he returns he’ll be coming off an
Achilles tear, one of the most difficult
injuries in sports. In the meantime, Irving
is joining a cohesive team that’s stacked
with young talent in a way that’s oddly
similar to the Celtics one he just spent
a full year emotionally tearing apart.
The irony is that, Dolan aside, the Knicks
really have tried to do the smart things
recently—avoiding pricey long-term con-
tracts, investing in young players and the
draft, trying to rebuild their roster and
rethink how they do business—to make
themselves look more attractive, to not just
rely on the Knicks name and mystique.
Their model for this is partly the Nets, who
just succeeded in doing exactly that, but is
probably closer to the Yankees, a team that
invested in the minor leagues and young
talent and then supplemented that with
expensive free agents. Just six months ago,
it was possible to dream of an MSG packed
with fans to watch Kristaps Porzingis,
Kevin Durant, and Zion Williamson. Never
mind that all three sort of play the same
position—the star power would have been
incredible, and anyway isn’t this a position-
less league now? When they traded Porzin-
gis to free up money in anticipation of sign-
ing Durant and Irving, you could still
imagine a pretty spectacular dynasty begin-
ning. Now, the Knicks obviously didn’t get
their big fish (and the Porzingis trade could
become a nightmare if he turns out to be
a superstar in Dallas), but they were smart
enough to at least put themselves in a posi-
tion to go after them, in part by assembling
an appealing cast of role players. That
might not seem like improvement, but it is,
and their refusal to sign Durant stand-ins to
massive long-term contracts in the wake of
their rejection gives them an opportunity to
make another run up the flagpole in a cou-
ple of years, when reigning MVP Giannis
Antetokounmpo hits the market. Is it a pipe
dream? Maybe. But it is in fact a plan,
something Knicks fans aren’t used to see-
ing. So don’t despair, Knicks fans. As awful
as this may seem right now, it is actually
a sign of some organizational wisdom.
Wisdom in failure, yes, but it still counts as
improvement. Which might be the saddest
part of all of this. ■seeking headlines rather than smart in-
vestments, signing aging veterans to big
dollars rather than young cost-controlled
talent. They acted like the Knicks, and they
failed like the Knicks.
But they learned their lesson, unlike the
Knicks. They pared down their payroll by
acquiring expensive expiring contracts,
endured several terrible seasons, concen-
trated on building a cohesive structure, got
their management team in gear and all on
the same page, and assembled an appeal-
ing team of low-cost castoffs who—last
year, at least—significantly outperformed
expectations. And now they have their re-
ward. Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, a
dream combo of free agents, are coming to
Brooklyn, one generational talent and one
year-in-year-out all-star joining a fran-
chise whose biggest previous stars were an
over-the-hill Kevin Garnett, a slouching
Deron Williams, and a yet-to-be-optimized
Brook Lopez. This is a major event for the
Brooklyn Nets—the major event—and yet
it might say even more about the team
across town, the one whose owner has
been eroding goodwill for one of the NBA’s
crown jewels year after year for literally
decades now. The Knicks have been tank-
ing for multiple seasons while in pursuit of
Durant and Irving, who were assumed as
recently as a month ago to be sure bets to
join the team, in a bid to— finally—revital-
ize the franchise and reap the rewards of
such a resurrection in the country’s biggest
media market. And now the entire planet
is pointing at the Knicks and laughing. It
feels like the Nets have won and the Knicks
have lost and there’s a new sheriff in town.
But is there?
let’s start with why a star like Du-
rant would even want to sign with the
Knicks, laughingstocks for so long you
almost start to feel bad making fun of
them. (Almost.) Nevertheless the fran-
chise retains a sort of tarnished aura: that
building, all its history, all the business op-
portunities, all those stars—Clyde, Ewing,
Riley, Oakley, Starks—Spike Lee, all the
celebrities (basically everybody but Woody
Allen anymore), the mostly assumed fact
that if you led the Knicks to their first title
in 47 years, you would instantly become
the most beloved athlete of this century in
New York, maybe even the world. Now
that the Cubs have won the World Series,
winning a championship for the Knicks is
one of the last globally canonizing achieve-
ments we have left.
We at least assumed Durant thought this
way, because there were so many reports
linking him to the team, and he had a cer-
tain chip on his shoulder about being tran-
Spike Lee
and Samuel L.
Jackson were
talking about the
Knicks at the
Oscars this year.
The Nets have
no such capital.