The Knicks have found the sweet spot – becoming good, yet without expectations
By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist
Obi Toppin’s fourth-quarter dunk in Game 2 of the Knicks’ playoff series against the Hawks electrified the crowd with a current of hope.
The bolt surged through every seat Wednesday, jolting fans to their feet and raising the decibel level to that of an aircraft carrier operating at full tilt. It wouldn’t have been a shock if the entire roof of the arena had blown off and floated away like one of the dirty, discarded face masks drifting around the arena’s Seventh Avenue entrance.
In the fully vaccinated section, people spilled beers and embraced, their smiles fully visible. For the first time in 16 months, I high-fived a stranger.
Toppin’s dunk was a small sweet spot inside a larger one. The Knicks currently occupy a rare window of time that exists only once every 50 years or so for a fan base. It’s the sports equivalent of a caterpillar emerging from its chrysalis as a butterfly: an extremely short moment of transformation from punchline to contender.
The awe doesn’t last very long. The team either goes back to being the butt of jokes, or fans start expecting it to fly close to the sun once a year. The wings fall off, or everyone gets used to the butterfly.
What I’m trying to say is that the Knicks are good for the first time in a long time.
But even during their last "good" run in 2013, New York lost in the Eastern Conference semifinals. In 2011 and 2012, the team lost in the first round of the playoffs, and its most recent trip to the Finals ended in a loss in 1999.
New York’s last Finals wins? 1970 and 1973.
As I wrote in this story about Nets and Knicks fandom, the most romantic kind of fandom is rooting for a losing team because at least you’re winning at being the most loyal. You willingly invest emotional capital in a group that continually lets you down simply because one tiny part of your brain thinks, "What if this is the year?"
While the chances of your optimism being founded are low, they’re not zero. Sports fans’ brains operate like Lloyd Christmas in "Dumb and Dumber" when Mary Swanson tells him that the odds of them getting together are one in a million. He replies, "So you’re saying there’s a chance?"
New Yorkers have reason to believe, finally, that the Knicks are good in a sustainable way. Veterans such as Julius Randle, Derrick Rose and Taj Gibson know what it’s like to be caterpillars. They are aware that even when you’re a butterfly, you can always revert back. Nothing is guaranteed, and these guys play like it.
This dedication brings out the best in young players such as Toppin, Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett and even in coach Tom Thibodeau. Thibs has been able to make adjustments that he historically hasn’t been willing to make — he was nimble in switching Elfrid Payton for Rose on Wednesday, for instance.
Many other teams have more raw talent, but this one has reserves of heart that propel it to wins.
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Nick Wright says the Knicks owe their Game 2 victory to Derrick Rose, who put his team on his back when they fell behind and got them back in the series.
Speaking of Rose, he put the team on his back against the Atlanta Hawks the way Randle did in the regular season. Randle’s playoff numbers haven’t been impressive, but can you blame him? He’s tired, man! He was the team’s first player to snag multiple triple-doubles in a season since Mark Jackson in 1989.
Rose has stepped up the past two games, dancing around the Hawks for midrange jumpers that Atlanta doesn’t know how to defend. The Hawks have built a team dependent on either driving to the basket or hitting impossible 3s. The Knicks’ grind-it-out, old-school approach seems to baffle them at times.
Despite the team’s success to this point, though, no one really thinks these Knicks can make it to the Finals, let alone win (but never say never!). But if the team makes playoff appearances for a few more seasons, fans will start to expect things.
And expectations are the root of all disappointment.
But that’s all in the future. Because the Knicks and their fans in 2021 are still breaking free of the cocoon, mesmerized by their wings and happy to have the gift of flight at all. They were thrilled with an above-.500 season, let alone a playoff win at the Garden. Fans of other teams don’t hate the Knicks yet (with the exception of Atlanta) because most people can admit that the fan base and team have suffered enough to earn something good.
Now, I’m going to try very hard to end this column without being corny, but I can’t make any promises. Because this run isn’t only about basketball.
At this time last year, the only collective experience basketball fans had (that sports fans had?) was a documentary about Michael Jordan that aired every Sunday for five weeks. Vaccines seemed more than a year away, if they would even work at all, and it often felt like we’d be caught in the hell of a surging disease until the end of time.
It was around then, when the number of Americans who had died of COVID-19 was nearing 100,000, that I wondered if we’d ever watch sports in person again. It was a trivial question, of course. Sports are clearly not essential the way healthcare workers, delivery people and grocery store clerks are.
But community is essential, and sports connect us to other people in a deep way. As I looked around the Garden on Wednesday, Moderna coursing through my veins, I couldn’t believe I was actually there. It still feels like a dream, knowing that the strangers I high-fived have a selfie in which I am obnoxiously waving from the row behind them. I barely remembered what spontaneous energy felt like.
Others didn’t seem to, either, which is what gave the game’s entire vibe a sense of gratitude. I’ve been to a lot of sports games because of this job, and I’ve experienced a lot of sports joy in my life as a fan. But none of those experiences felt as profound as Wednesday’s. None represented resilience more than these scrappy Knicks — whom no one expected to still be playing basketball heading into June — coming back from a 15-point deficit to win at home after 16 months of sickness.
Last year, article after article popped into my news feed proclaiming New York dead. But on Wednesday, as I exited the building with thousands of people chanting "Trae Young is balding" while thousands more danced in the streets, it was clear that the headlines were wrong.
No matter what happens in these playoffs or in years to come, one thing is certain: New York and the Knicks are both very much alive.
Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and co-host of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.