Another All-Star weekend will pass us, and my Knicks are still stinking up the joint. It's as simple as that; this organization may never find its way back to the postseason at this rate. After falling to the Celtics at the Garden on Christmas Day, this team has removed itself from the playoff race, boasting a record that wouldn't even put them close to the 8 seed in the Eastern Conference. We have the talent, hype, and desire from both the players and the fans, but we don't have the wins to show for any of it.
I'm happy that Carmelo Anthony is an All-Star again, because I want to see him succeed. He has been having a fine season, but the fact remains that he can't win games for his team the same way his buddy Lebron can. Maybe it was unfair to make those comparisons in the first place, but this season, with the talent the Knicks had around him, I felt they were destined to be somewhere in the playoff mix. Instead, they've found themselves snowballing to more and more mediocrity
I'm also glad Porzingis and undrafted Hernangomez played in the Rising Stars game. Porzingis was close to being an All-Star this year, and I'm hoping he will continue to put up great numbers for years to come. However, he is still very young and is nowhere close to carrying an NBA team yet to any kind of playoff stature. Thus, the Knicks are stuck in a messy situation where they want to rebuild while simultaneously trying to win games. The strategy has not panned out.
As much as I enjoy and root for the players to succeed, I can't get past the fact that this team is a constant display of inconsistency, and that doesn't just mean from this season. As long as I have watched basketball, it seems that this organization is only good at hyping its fans up for disappointment, and being the avid fan that I am, it is almost unbearable to think that every year we have a chance of moving forward and we ending going backwards.
I can't stand when ESPN and all the other sports anchors give the Knicks and the organization a bad rep, but they do have fairly good points in doing so. I guess that frustration is mostly in part by me feeling as if they can break the spell they're in. It's funny to call it a spell, but the organization is most likely cursed. No matter who they bring in to help out, it always seems to end the same way, with off-court drama to boot.
Maybe this year's team just didn't have a winning formula from the beginning. Derrick Rose and Carmelo Anthony have both had good games, but both of them need the ball to be successful and shoot a lot of mid-range jumpers, where in the changing league now are low percentage shots. The most successful teams in the NBA this year such as the Rockets and the Warriors in particular shoot a lot of 3s, unlike Melo and Rose who both take a lot of tough shots in isolation. It is unclear as to whether or not that is the real issue, but the problems with the Knicks spans beyond that. Take for example the Charles Oakley debacle, only taking place a couple of weeks ago.
So that's my rant for the week. I'm really hoping that my Knicks can turn it around, and that hope is a rather optimistic one. As much as I love the Knicks, I can't stand them. It's the most frustrating kind of fandom for sure.
