WE keep asking ourselves how bad things can get with the Knicks, and we keep thinking they’ve raised (or lowered) the bar as high (or as low) as is humanly possible. And then they keep revising themselves, reinventing platinum standards for high basketball comedy and low basketball accomplishment.
How bad can it get? This is how bad it can get: They can’t even generate a good, old-fashioned intramural controversy, mostly because there’s no hero and no villain in the Isiah Thomas/Stephon Marbury conflict. Asked yesterday, before the Knicks’ 119-105 loss to the Cavaliers, if he will ever play again in the city of his birth, Marbury said: “I pray to God I will. I love New York.” And you can forgive New York if it doesn’t exactly greet that wistful wish with waves of grins and gratitude. Because, let’s face it: The only possible reason Marbury would be considered even a slightly sympathetic figure is because of whom he’s being compared to.
“My heart is here and always has been here,” Marbury said yesterday. “Sometimes things don’t work out the way you want them to.”
Make no mistake: Every rancid thing the Knicks have become can be traced to the day that Isiah Thomas showed up and began dismantling 50 years of dignity and tradition brick by brick, loss by loss, transgression by transgression. Thomas is the man who has turned the Knicks into a freak show, into a loss machine, into a laughingstock, first by his unrelenting incompetence as team president and then somehow surpassing that ineptitude as a coach.
Everything the man has touched in his tenure has turned to charcoal. Last night, I twice tried to throw him a life raft to explain how he’s managed to completely botch this Marbury saga, the latest faux pas on his watch.
“Are you embarrassed by this?” I asked.
He started to talk about how we should all ask Marbury about how embarrassed he was until I interrupted and repeated the question: Are you embarrassed? And he repeated the answer, the latest Stepford-Wife response from this Stepford-Wife basketball ghost.
But Marbury has got to be kidding if he wants us to believe he is a put-upon victim of Isiah’s World, the latest employee to be harassed by this recidivist harasser.
Marbury’s time with the Knicks has been a blur of scowls covering his face and towels covering his head; of “Get in the truck” and his barely coherent summer tour of 2007; of Machiavellian machinations that helped drive Keith Van Horn out of town and nearly drove Larry Brown insane; of declaring himself the best point guard in the NBA when he was barely second-best in the building (the Meadowlands) in which he uttered that nonsense; of fights picked with teammates; of bailing on those teammates; of so many start-and-stop reinventions that it is impossible to keep track.
Now he wants to be a Knick? Why, because he grew up in Coney Island? Because he grew up sneaking into the Garden? At what point do we stop being conned by that line of pap, anyway? Marbury’s time as a Knick has been an abject failure, a litany of lousy moments and lost opportunity, overshadowed only by the man who brought him here.
In a week when we were reminded of just how wonderful pro basketball can be, a week when we’ve already seen the magic of Chris Paul, a week when LeBron James dropped 50 last night while barely breaking a sweat, with the Pistons bringing their act to the Garden tomorrow, we are again reminded that the Knicks might as well be wearing Washington Generals jerseys, so insignificant is their presence at the Garden.
Convict Isiah for that. Indict Marbury as his co-conspirator. These two have always deserved each other anyway. Soon, if there’s any mercy at all, they can enjoy each other’s company in a place far, far away from here.