The New York Knicks need a reason to celebrate again

With another lost season, the New York Knicks and their fans find themselves are left with two decades of failure

Does anyone remember the New York Knicks?

No no, not these Knicks. The squad you see before you are just downright not good. I am reluctant to go into the team statistics because it will not paint the right picture of how bad the New York Knicks have been for the last 20 years.

Instead, let’s first take a look at the construct of the team. Now having small forward, RJ Barrett is the most excited the Knicks have been over a draft pick since the days of Patrick Ewing. So how has he done? Meh. Look, 14 points in 30 minutes a night is not bad for a rookie on a bad team. It just is important to note that in a league where teams crave that their stars have some sort of 3-point shot, Barrett is not one of those guys. That is not a shock, as his lone year in college showed a similarly low 3-point percentage.

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Beyond Barrett, the rest of this Knicks team is a grab bag of pieces that just do not fit well. Mitchell Robinson is one of the younger athletic big men in the league, but has been relegated to a bench role and only brings down nearly seven rebounds a game. Julius Randle is quietly having a solid year, but the five-year power forward is shooting 26 percent from deep, making him a complete liability from beyond the paint.

How about Dennis Smith Jr or Alonzo Trier? Two promising young guards only a year ago are now in the midst of garbage time duty. In addition, last year’s first-round pick Kevin Knox has taken a major step backward from a productive rookie year. You get the point: things just seem messy.

Who is to blame? Management of course.

Owner James Dolan has made a mess of the Knicks. From Isiah Thomas to Steve Mills, to Phil Jackson, he just cannot seem to find anyone who knows how to put together a winning team. As fans, we deserve more. We need more. The expectation is not to be NBA champs overnight, but can we stop being the laughingstock of the league?

What separates the New York Knicks’ front office from every other team in the league is that everything has been a mess since 2000 when they last made a Conference Finals appearance.

Consider this, in that time, 27 teams have gone on to play in the Conference Finals (Clippers, Hornets, and Knicks are the missing ones). While you may be able to look past that, can you also look past the fact that they only gone to the playoffs four times since 2000 with only one second-round appearance?

Can you look past the fact that they have had a grand total of 13 coaches in 20 years? You assume that current coach Mike Miller is out after the season, so how can you tell an upcoming free agent that the New York Knicks are all about stability?

Speaking of which, how have the Knicks done in the last 20 years with free agents? Well, Amar’e Stoudemire is the biggest splash they made, but his numbers quickly declined since his initial season with the team in 2010. J.R. Smith and Tyson Chandler were also good signings, but what did it amount to? Smith became a Sixth Man of the Year winner and Chandler was a Defensive Player of the Year, which are great individual awards, but the team still went nowhere.

The point is that free agents do not want to suit up for the New York Knicks. You might have to go back all the way to 1996 when Allan Houston left the Pistons for the Knicks. Latrell Sprewell, Stephon Marbury, and Carmelo Anthony were all products of trades.

So if they can’t have guys want to come to New York, then surely they can draft the right guys, right? Not so fast. Sure you have gems like David Lee and Kristaps Porzingis, but both left early in their careers. New York is more known for who they didn’t draft. Instead of grabbing Jordan Hill in 2009, they could have gone with players like Jrue Holiday or DeMar DeRozan. Instead of drafting Frank Ntilikina in 2017, they could have taken Bam Adebayo or Donovan Mitchell. Can you just imagine how good the Knicks would have been with small adjustments like this?

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There is plenty of things wrong with the New York Knicks and that is well documented. The deeper issue is to focus on what is to come. If there is a revolving door of coaches, free agents turning their noses and going to play in Brooklyn, or let so many stars slip in the draft, the front office has no one to blame but themselves.

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