Basketball. The game where a franchise can suck for eternity.
Yeah, it is possible in other sports but with Basketball the sucking can last forever. Take the Knicks. They are my team by birth place. They have not been to the playoffs since 2013. They have not won the entire thing since 73. This is to say they have not won a championship in my lifetime. That is terrible. It is statistically ridiculous. Moreover it reflects a defined failure by management to create the opportunities for success that other franchises have. Nobody wants to come to New York to play for the Knicks. Two Olympic level ballers just signed with the Nets this year. The Knicks were never in the running.
Drafting players has not helped. The don’t ever win the lottery, so they end up with a trash pick. This is a problem, because they used to be legit. The team made the playoffs from 1988 – 2001. This is why it is so hard for me to accept the suck. They had a brief return to the playoffs from 2011 – 2013, getting knocked out in the first round two of those three years. At least it felt good for a minute.
The problem is that they have bad ownership. The good players they draft do not stay and that is almost entirely because of ownership. James Dolan took control of the team 21 years ago. In that time they’ve been a playoff team 7 times. Of those 7, three came in the immediate years after purchase before Dolan et al dismantled the team.
Some people cannot accept that they are not good at a thing. Dolan cannot accept that he is not a good owner the way Trump cannot accept that he is not a good president. Maybe it is a New Yorker thing. We have always been a people who look defeat in the face and say, “nah.”
We tend to treat reality with the same utter disregard.
I see this same thing happening with the Knicks. I see it throughout the New York sports franchises. I see it throughout New York, a city that thinks very little about the worrisome climate reality for a coastal city becoming more and more prone to weather events.
The key, I think, is to wake up and see the reality and decide that it is time to move on. If the ownership does not do so soon, I will as a fan.