The Knicks are in an endlessly frustrating game of double or nothing and it began long before Isiah Thomas was hired.
Marcus Camby and Nene for Antonio McDyess was a Scott Layden double or nothing.
Antonio McDyess for Stephon Marbury and Penny Hardaway was Isiah continuing the double or nothing formula.
Antonio Davis for Jalen Rose was merely the double or nothing time of the month and the clockwork orange and blue said go.
These double or nothing moves are as much a product of the ?win immediately or else? mentality that has developed in New York over the past 30 years, fueled by the Yankees and followed by the Rangers and Mets, as it is because of the no end in sight pockets of Cablevision. Cablevision permits expensive lateral transaction after expensive lateral transaction to continue without consequence, like a wealthy father that keeps footing the bill of his teenage son?s car crashes and rehab.
Knee-jerk reactions are usually wrong but in an unequivocal disaster, which clearly the Knicks qualify as, utter failure must be met with change and perhaps the ?World?s Most Famous Disaster? would be alleviated for everyone if Larry Brown takes the rest of the season off.
The only reason for him to remain is for the team to learn from his proven basketball wisdom, during practices and during games, but any productive time that Brown is spending with the club is very heavily veiled at this point.
He does not particularly like or understand his roster and the whole experience is clearly just passing as bearable for Brown; it is agonizingly evident in his eyes and body language.
The complete lack of energy, confidence, defensive effort or anything else resembling a real NBA team is appalling. The constant abuses at the hands of the opposition -- home or away -- are demoralizing the team, a team that I still believe has too much talent to play this bad.
"It's killing me because I'm the coach and I've got the responsibility to make the team play better," Brown said after their loss on Wednesday to the Nets. "Obviously, we're not getting better."
His rollercoaster rotations and strange desire to be passive aggressive towards his players through the media is nearly enough reason to put an end to the travesty for the rest of the season.
The team has collapsed in every way and it is self-evident that none of Brown's teaching is getting through. Therefore what is the point of Brown staying on for the rest of this season? This isn?t Larry Brown going through his Norman Dale phase, where he?ll ?break them down, before building them back up again.? This has become something else. Breaking down a team is fine, but what has happened with the Knicks is you have a collection of players that play the game clinically insecure.
Larry Brown has experienced similar difficulties in his first season with clubs before. He came off a National Championship with Danny Manning and the Kansas Jayhawks by inheriting a bad Spurs club and that team ended the season 40 games under .500. In his first season with the Sixers, he cut that in half, by finishing 20 games under .500. The results here with the Knicks will be somewhere in between, but the climate in San Antonio is absurdly more accepting and while Philadelphia is a tough town, the Wachovia Center isn?t branded as the World?s Most Famous Arena and while Comcast and Cablevision are peers, the mindsets of Ed Snider and James Dolan when it comes to their franchises are as different as their lifestyles.
Herb Williams finished off the job for the Knicks last season and he can finish again this year, as the team attempts to regain some semblance of not being a team that a Sam Cassell prances around and laughs about. Williams is perfectly capable of developing young players like David Lee and Nate Robinson and help stabilize the personnel as they wait for Brown to come back reenergized and recommitted to getting the Knicks back to the legion of NBA respectability.
Channing Frye and Eddy Curry have the potential to become one of the best 1-2 punches at power forward and center in the game. In these two players, you have the potential for a Baby Duncan and Baby Shaq (article on this forthcoming after the deadline) and will give Isiah Thomas a lot to work with while New York waits for one of these double or nothings to stick. When that one does, you?ll hear next week?s slam dunk champ, Nate Robinson, say, ?Let's win this game for all the small schools that never had a chance to get here,? except replace ?small schools? with ?double the cap teams? and then you have your New York worthy ball club.
In Other Brown News?
- Even the most devout believers are now at the end of their rope with Kwame Brown. I?ll admit that I thought that the Lakers were taking a nice gamble by trading Caron '34 and 15' Butler (a player that they had little use for unless they were to deal Odom and was in line for an extension, which the Wizards inked him to) and Chucky Atkins for Brown last summer, but at this point I think Chris Washburn, who is somehow still playing basketball in Switzerland, has a better chance of panning out.
Brown has been dreadful for the Lakers, who are remarkably better without him on the floor. He has had as much trouble grasping the rock as he has the triangle and because of this, I will no longer get baited by night?s where he goes for 18 and 12 like he did in the middle of January against the Warriors.
But ultimately, all those like Kwame Brown, those wildly talented players that just can?t pan out, should receive the gift of playing out a 10-day with the Suns before joining Ted Williams at the cryogenic warehouse in nearby Scottsdale, Arizona, where Kwame can wait for science to give him Cris Carter?s hands and then he can become the next Moses Malone.
Meanwhile, Nikoloz Tskitishvili?s train across the Atlantic back to Georgia is on hold thanks to the guy that originally vouched for him and like Frank Sinatra said, ?If you can?t make it in Phoenix, you can?t make it anywhere.?
Kwame turns 24 on March 10th and even though the white flag of 'Kwame as a very good player' has been waved, there's no reason to believe he'll be out of the league by the time he's 30. Greg Ostertag turns 33 four days before Kwame's birthday and even he has started 22 games this year for Utah.
- The odds of the Warriors winning a game fluctuates principally based on how frequently Baron Davis will make a concerted effort to penetrate and dish while laying off the 3-point shot, coupled with Mike Montgomery at all costs avoiding, placing Adonal Foyle, Troy Murphy and Mike Dunleavy on the floor together. In the Warriors? five-man rotations that have played at least 20 minutes, when this trio is on the floor together, the Warriors are a combined -30, without a single positive combination in the lot. The athletic deficiencies that these three players have are not a dire issue when teamed with a more athletic frontcourt, particularly when they go small. Run FTD are decidedly more than the sum of their parts.
Christopher Reina is the executive editor of RealGM.com and can be reached at Chris@RealGM.com.