For now, and for good, it doesn’t matter how close the Knicks came to signing LeBron James, if they finished second, third or sixth. For now, and for good, it doesn’t matter that James Dolan sent Isiah Thomas to do his final bidding before the King, a bald act of treachery that shows how little regard he really has for the intelligence of the fans who fill his building, whom he hollowly called “the best in the world” yesterday afternoon.
For now, for good, it can’t matter that in a salary-capped world, the Knicks will never be able to use money as a sledgehammer the way the Yankees can in the lawless economic frontier of baseball, and that LeBron James will almost certainly never play one minute of his prime in Knicks’ colors.
If you are the Knicks, and if you root for the Knicks, the pursuit of LeBron is officially a part of yesterday, officially a part of the past – the same way Donnie Walsh’s tenure running the team may soon be part of the past. It serves no purpose to lament, to lick wounds, to shake an angry fist at that old master of Machiavelli, Pat Riley.
If the Knicks are ever going to become something other than a civic eyesore, then yesterday must be remembered as much for the player who said “yes” as for the player who said “no thank you,” as much for what may turn out to be Walsh’s parting gift to the franchise, a swap with Golden State that yielded a haul of serviceable (and maybe more) players for David Lee.
No, Walsh had said more than nine hours earlier, sitting in his wheelchair at a side table set up near where the Knicks’ bench usually sits: He hadn’t heard from LeBron James’ camp yet – and wouldn’t until a half hour or so before the excruciating excuse for news that ESPN would present on television. Certainly not, he insisted: he wouldn’t be watching the drama unfold in real time.
“I’m sure I’ll get a call from you folks 30 seconds afterward,” he said, a few minutes after the Knicks officially presented Amar’e Stoudemire to New York City. “Then I’ll know whether I should run through my window or jump out of it.”
He smiled a thin smile, a man who knew he was holding bad cards even as he refused to admit it until he was officially beaten. Understand something: Walsh never promised LeBron. He never guaranteed the King. He said he would try to undo a decade worth of fiscal sins, did that. Stoudemire is here. Others will follow. If Walsh is indeed moving for the door, he did well by this team, and Knicks fans can only hope Dolan picks a successor who can ably finish his work.
“Our intention was to make this team viable and competitive not only for one year but for many years,” Walsh said. The price, to date, is a two-year tour of the wilderness, and if the Knicks were ultimately strung along by James and his merry band of yes-men, well, that’s life in the major leagues.
But if you are a Knicks fan, you can speak about your basketball team in the present tense again. That is something. It is certainly a better morning here than in Cleveland, that scarred city of sporting heartbreak, which in baseball doesn’t have enough money to keep its players and in basketball can’t keep them even when they have the [ital] most [ital] money to give.
You aren’t the Nets, whose 225-foot-tall advertising invasion caused such a stir last week yet now looks more bush league than a pregame cow-milking contest, Jay-Z’s scowl and Mikhail Prokhorov’s smirk the new co-faces of Nets ineptitude.
“New York isn’t for everyone,” Stoudemire had said, during one of the spasms of “his” day that wasn’t preoccupied with thoughts of LeBron James. “But I think it’s perfect for me.”
We’ll soon see if it is, but what you need to do now if you care about the Knicks, hard as it may be, is to moisten your fingers and turn the page, assuming Dolan doesn’t do something repulsive, like welcome Isiah back into a place of prominence. Mike D’Antoni did, flying to Las Vegas for summer league, not even bothering to rearrange his flight so he could watch LeBron hijack sporting America for an hour.
Good for D’Antoni. Good for you to do the same. The mourning after is for losers. The quicker we all move on, the better.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com