Singer-model Ciara — who’s been making the rounds in town with Knicks star Amar’e Stoudemire a lot lately — cheers on her new pal at the Garden on Monday.
I’m lucky enough to be in the full thrall of a wonderful book right now. It’s “Then Everything Changed” by CBS’ Jeff Greenfield, and it’s a joy for history buffs, taking three nearly-happened moments in modern American history and speculating — elegantly — about what might’ve been if they had happened. Which brings us, as all things must these days, to the Knicks. Increasingly, as the losses have mounted and the winds have turned ill, there’s a growing number of Knicks fans who would like to apply some alternate history to what’s become of the team in the month-plus since trading for Carmelo Anthony.
Some were down on the trade to start, and they certainly have a right to crow. Some have done a 180 on their original opinions. Some straddle dueling bandwagons.
So as the Knicks prepare for the Nets tonight at the Garden, where they’ll attempt to pull off their first two-game winning streak in three weeks, it seems an appropriate time to drop a “What-if?” ink tablet into the Garden’s waters.
What if the Knicks had left well enough alone?
It’s hard to believe the Knicks would have played at a much higher level than what we saw them at through the season’s first 54 games. They were 28-26 at the moment the trade was consummated, a .519 winning percentage. The Knicks of Gallo, Ray Felton and company might not have been able to duplicate this group’s best wins (at Miami, at Memphis), but they likely wouldn’t have collected the pile of awful losses, either.
So let’s keep them at a .519 clip. So right now, instead of sitting at 36-38 and in seventh place, two-fisting kryptonite to keep the Pacers and Bobcats behind them, they would be 38-36, tied with the surging Sixers for sixth. Maybe they’d be 39-35, if you really believe the chemistry you saw with that assemblage was real, and growing.
OK. If that happened, we probably wouldn’t have even once compared the ’11 Knicks to the ’07 Mets. Landry Fields wouldn’t currently be lost in the NBA’s witness-protection program, because his game, clearly, benefited from the old lineup. The team still would be celebrated for every positive step (and every backward trip would either be written off to their limitations or, now, camouflaged by the onset of baseball).
It was a fun team, no doubt. Harmless. Impossible not to root for. In other words: exactly the opposite of just about every emotion you’re feeling now.
But think about this, before firing off a verse of “Those Were the Days, My Friend”:
Think about what Amar’e Stoudemire looks like now, which is to say (take your pick): limited, gimpy, worn-down, exhausted, foggy, groggy, listless, lethargic. Yes, you can blame all of that on Mike D’Antoni playing him 40 minutes a night back in November, but the truth is, he had to play that much to get the Knicks on a winning track. He was the core. He was the energy source, some nights the only one.
And on a Knicks team that would resemble the one that played the first 54 games, he’d still have to be. Only the Stoudemire we see now bears no resemblance to the one we saw during the Knicks’ emergence. Which leaves you with only two logical conclusions:
1. There’s no shot the Knicks would have maintained their earlier pace with Wilson Chandler or Gallinari replacing Stoudemire as the go-to guy.
2. They may never replicate it again. But as Anthony showed against the Magic on Monday (and, if you’re going to be fair, has shown more often than not), say what you will about the Knicks now, but they are certainly not over-dependent on Stoudemire and his fickle knees right now.
What the Knicks need, as much as anything, is a brief surge to wrap up the playoffs and the
No. 7 seed, and then a final week when they can shut Stoudemire down and reboot for the playoffs. Maybe that works, maybe it doesn’t, but it gives the Knicks a far more legitimate chance to be interesting in April than they otherwise would have had.
In this case, I’ll take history as it happened, and take my chances.