You go to bed angry at the NBA, you wake up anxious about the Knicks. It’s a healthy trade-off. Friday night brings another marathon bargaining session between players and owners, and Saturday morning yields news of a handshake agreement at the conclusion of those talks, and a 66-game schedule that should begin at high noon on Christmas Day.
Basketball, back in business. Back where it belongs.
It’s right and it’s good that for the Knicks, for New York City, this should all commence at Madison Square Garden against the Celtics, the first game of the new season, the first game of the first full (well, quasi-full, anyway) season featuring Amare’ Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony. It’s right and it’s good that this season will start, finally, in the same place where last year’s ended.
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“I can’t speak for anyone else,” Carmelo Anthony had said on the final Sunday of the season last year, when the Celtics had finally chased the Knicks away, completing a four-game sweep in the Garden. “But I wish we could play four more games against them right away. Starting tomorrow.”
It was the kind of thing you say when a season ends, especially because it was understood what was coming, that we would have to endure almost five full months of back-and-forth between the millionaires and the billionaires before they could come to an agreeable way to split their pricey pie.
Now, it seems Anthony will get his wish. And so will you, who learned to fall so hard for the Knicks again last winter and spring, who may need a week or two to thaw out from the mind-numbing rhetoric that passed for basketball news in that time.
Now the Knicks will be on the clock, for the first time in forever. Even as intriguing as last season was, the Knicks entered with limited aspirations, nobody knowing how Stoudemire was going to adjust to his new role as the team’s foundation, nobody knowing Anthony and Chauncey Billups would join him by the All-Star Game, nobody knowing half the team would first help recapture the city’s basketball imagination and then be cast out in order to reshape the roster.
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That honeymoon ended months ago. The innocent climb won’t be so innocent anymore. For the first time in forever, there will be expectations attached to every step, to every misstep, to every winning streak and every losing streak. Coach Mike D’Antoni will be the first body in the line of fire, and while he hired a defensive specialist as an assistant in Mike Woodson, he had better hope for a fast start.
We haven’t heard chants of “Fire D’Antoni” yet, but those won’t be far away, maybe only as far as the first three-game losing streak. Knicks fans will be back. If 10 years in the wilderness didn’t drive them away, if their anger over increased ticket prices didn’t alienate last spring, they will get over a lockout, just as long as they’re given a reason to.
They will want to see progress. Maybe they understand a championship run isn’t in sight yet, but that’s the key word — yet. It has been easy to forget all of that while we listened to the rhetoric the past few months.
Starting now, we get to hear something else: We get to hear a restless fan base, eager to embrace its basketball soul again. All the Knicks have to do now is prove they were worth the wait.