The Knicks Are Struggling To be Fun

The team has Karl-Anthony Towns, Jalen Brunson, and Mikal Bridges, but the pale in adoration in relation to last year's team. Why?

Mikal Bridges is never quite exuberant. He’s a man with dashingly large eyes — so expressive that they make verbal communication unnecessary — and they seem to get bigger when cameras zoom in on his face during the telecast. His beard is never quite crisp since it maintains a charmingly small and slightly uphill shape that doesn’t feel like he will soon be using Rick Ross’s beard oil any time soon. He’s never joshing like Josh Hart; he’s not a polished politician like Jalen Brunson is. At times, watching him can seem innocuous. In a league of man-eaters, Herculean leapers and strenuous cutters, Bridges is decidedly human, with a style of play that is not unlike someone you played against at the West Side YMCA a couple of weeks ago. His favorite move on the court is to get the ball in motion, take some dribbles and stop and shoot a 15-footer. It’s an unremarkable move that works because of his lengthy arms. Natural cycles of disappointed play and shooting funks cloud his orbit, and can turn fans from calm to agitated. For five first round picks, fans want Bridges to be a dead-eyed psychopath. He does not seem to be that.

His sensitivity has been on display, during a year where the price to trade for him has encouraged a kind of disappointment in his play that Knicks fans have enthusiastically promoted. After a game in February, a game where the Knicks had won, Bridges’s postgame interview on the court looked devoid of joy, in a way it does when someone’s will to have fun has been completely broken. He was answering questions in a flat, monotone tone that usually is birthed by boredom. Rappers that I have interviewed often sound like that, and it is because they don’t go through life being allowed to show that kind of unabashed joy. I suddenly felt bad for Bridges, since I was one of the people that criticized him for his play. There’s a band of Knicks fans, and we’ll get to this more later, that have brought a Yankees or Giants culture to the once-harmonious atmosphere of Knicks fandom. It’s turned being a Knicks fan into a hyper-capitalist brand. So, I am conscious of the way I speak about these players, extraordinarily talented Black men that have defeated every statistic in the world that says dreaming to be a professional sports star is unlikely and a waste of your time on earth. Still, I’ve been hard on Bridges throughout the season. He first entered our consciousness by trying to fix what seemed like a broken jump shot, and because I know people from Philadelphia who still flinch whenever they hear the name Markelle Fultz, my guard went up. I treated him harshly. The first-round picks that we gave up for him felt like overload for a player who hasn’t been an All-Star, and it is something that worries me because giving away picks strips you of flexibility in the future. And, quite frankly, the “Villanova Knicks” stuff is odd; it directly tells everyone that what matters is a group of college players coming together to play for the Knicks, not these other Black men with money. It is accepting of one kind of athlete and not another kind of athlete. So many people who didn’t watch the NBA started to watch when we had Josh Hart, Jalen Brunson, and Donte DiVincenzo on the same team. That renders the whole phenomenon of the “Nova Knicks” as fake and possibly morally corrupt. I saw the people who were cheering for that — white people who I have known for many years — and I thought it was stupidly corny. It’s a conotation that I am not comfortable with. So, I have treated Bridges with a ton of tough love, tougher than I am with somebody like OG Anunoby. (It does not help that he is essentially replacing Donte DiVincenzo, who I talk about as if he was a close personal friend of mine).

On March 12, Bridges won a game for the Knicks, at a crucial time for the team. Jalen Brunson, our small horse, is hurt, out with an ankle sprain that probably caused Leon Rose to look at the results for the entire day before admitting that the diagnosis was accurate. The Knicks were down a single point in Portland, in front of an arena that was filled with Knicks fans somehow, and Bridges inbounded the ball, got it back, and nailed a three-pointer as time ran out. For the first time since his Christmas Day game against the Spurs, Bridges seemed relieved, willed to joyfulness. He was dancing. He was having fun. He was the hero. Ben Stiller tweeted his name out.

However, as the month of March rolls on, and the players begin to zone in on the NBA Finals trophy, the Knicks are a strange team to talk about. Fandom isn’t a matter of enjoyment, it is a matter of where the team is on the standings and power rankings. The vibes seem off. They’re third in the Eastern Conference but it does not seem like the same team that won our devotion the previous season. Over the weekend, Tom Thibodeau and Josh Hart bickered like a player and a coach from a below-average team, not a contender. Hart and Thibodeau are both notoriously fiery and have a strong, close relationship, but for a second, Knicks fans must have wondered if they actually could understand this team at all. They are filled with stars that are tremendous — seriously, Karl-Anthony Towns is such a dynamic offensive player — but they don’t have players that have the identity that New Yorkers cling onto. Knicks fans want a player that seems like somebody that could possibly be one of the millions of people breaking their arms and backs to provide for their family. Fans are upset at the defensive identity the team doesn’t have. To Knicks fans, it is defense that makes us so horny that we want to touch the distaff breasts. Last year’s team operated like a trademarked underdog would — putting one central star around a few rag-tag but hard-working gentlemen — but this team does not seem to know itself as well. I never thought last year’s team was going to the NBA Finals but it was akin to a college team in their sort of tribal charisma. Ironically, considering all the college ties involved, this year have more of a mercenary vibe. It’s adrift, resting on the fact they have two fantastic offensive players. It’s shiny; it’s winning at a strong pace, no doubt, but without the proud cheerfulness of last season. The team does not seem as close, as connected as they were last season: on Saturday night, the Knicks lost to the Warriors and even though Draymond Green’s decided to be an aggressive heel towards Karl-Anthony Towns on his podcast, Mikal Bridges, OG Anunoby, and Tom Thibodeau all shook Green’s hand at the end of the game. I hope Towns didn’t take that too personally, and if he didn’t, he is a better person than I am.

There is another reason that the Knicks don’t seem as much fun this season. It seems to me that Knicks fans are including the overall sentiment of other fans in their thinking, which is that the NBA does not matter unless your team is in position to win the NBA Finals. I’m sure you’ve seen it: it comes from the kind of people who seemed to prefer college basketball for reasons that are obvious if you look at their likes on X, formerly called Twitter. It comes from people who don’t like watching rich Black men. The NBA is not a perfect league, I do think the All-Star game is unfortunately dull, and I do think its corny embrace of neoliberal politics has been a mistake, but it is like being Black in America: we are forced to be twice as better to get half of the respect white America gets.To me, the skillset of the players far outweighs any issues the league has in its presentation. And if it doesn’t, then perhaps the league is not for you. It’s hard: sports has long been competition’s greatest child, an activity involving physical exertion and skill that allows you to test that against other people. To be a fan of sport is to want competition to prosper, and to be a fan is to want to win. The NBA, though, is a league of burning superstardom, domination that feels insurmountable like the White Whale. It stands that the Boston Celtics can look unstoppable, and the mood in Knicks land will deflate because we probably can’t defeat the Celtics. What’s the point of watching a league if the chatter around it suggests that winning a ring is the most important? Why pretend like rings don’t make the rigor we put ourselves through as fans worth it?

It is not that I do not want to win. I often watched bad Knicks teams embarrass themselves on the Garden floor growing up, and it was startlingly upsetting, the feeling of your hometown team being consistently outclassed. It was almost like the opposition geared up for games against us because they knew they would have a chance to explosively shine on the big stage. LeBron James made Madison Square Garden his own personal one-man show. Him, Curry, Giannis, Kobe — those “extra gear” maniacs — felt unstoppable at the Garden. Seeing the Knicks pick themselves up by the bootstraps, if you will, was good. Seeing Brunson bring a seemingly new fanbase to the fold, and bring back older people who had long been exasperated with the Knicks, was great. The Knicks, at their best, bring New Yorkers of all stripes together in a city built for strife and schisms. They’re the subway system of the sporting scene in New York. And last year, it was functioning efficiently; this season, however, there’s been distrust and discontent.

I’m worried, though. I’m worried that fans are treating this team, and the great league, like it doesn’t matter unless we win. That’s a sad way to view sport and sports, especially since it is not us that are in the battle, it is us watching the battle, hoping that the battlers perform at their highest ability. We’re watching them; you are Maybe that is the fault of Shaq and his bedfellows on television who denounce you if you don’t have a ring, and mercilessly tease Kevin Durant for having to do it with Stephen Curry, but I also happen to believe in the potential of the NBA. The NBA is a league that can inspire and shock people because the players are so above the rest of the public, talent-wise. It doesn’t make sense to complain about a team that isn’t good enough to go to the NBA Finals when you can watch a 7’0 Karl-Anthony Towns drill stepback threes with a casual flair that never gets old. It could seem to me that fans just don’t care enough about immaculate skill — they only want immaculate vibes.

Knicks fandom relies on vibes, more than any other fanbase, because while the team has had great teams, they are not expected to be great; they are only expected to be entertaining. They’re only expected to represent New York. If the 90’s Knicks had won, it almost doesn’t matter because they are folk heroes regardless of John Starks’s crash out. Bernard King didn’t sniff a title but he dropped a lot of points on the biggest stage imaginable and was a tough cover for Larry Bird. The Knicks are a vessel for memories that have nothing to do with winning, especially if you are of a certain age. The organization is famous, if not necessarily successful, because they have never had to be. The winner is the lore of being a Knicks fan, not even the team themselves. So, why aren’t any of the fans happy? Why doesn't the team inspire me like they did last season? There’s no way to quantify and know, but if you look at Mikal Bridges’s face, at times you see someone who has absorbed the tenor of the fanbase.