While the Knicks regular season opener is tonight, I had the pleasure of attending their pre-season game last Friday night against Toronto. Despite the game taking place in Canada, neither Drake, or Phil Jackson, were sadly in attendance. And after witnessing what happened, perhaps that was for the best.
The game was highly entertaining, with no less than 10-12 alley-oops being completed, and a ton of other characteristics of high action, highly team-oriented basketball were exhibited.
Unfortunately, not a single one of those exhilarating plays were performed by the Knicks. Toronto was the team that looked like it has a bright future ahead of it. Kyle Lowry and Damar DeRozan looked like nothing short of All Stars; and all night those two pushed their team into a fast paced, fast break type of defense transitioning to offense which was not slowed, also all night long. It was truly awesome to watch, except that they were balling out, all over the Knicks.
On the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from the young, seriously athletic Toronto team, was the Knicks. I was hoping to see an energetic, albeit early-season implementation of the Triangle Offense, and other Phil Jackson-ian, effective basketball concepts. But what we got, was the same plodding, isolation-based offense that has earned the Knicks exactly one playoff win in the past decade.
My average facial expression at the game, as exhibited by Knicks owner James Dolan
They literally looked exactly like they did last year. Instead of ball movement, iso- plays were run for Carmelo and JR Smith. Like, every time up the court. Instead of instinctually reading the defense, even my girlfriend observed that they “looked like they were thinking”. There was not a single hint or flash of anything that would give me hope for this season as a Knicks fan. And with that, let’s get this season going!
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