This is the easy time. This is the fun time. For NBA fans, the latter half of July is a time to check in on the summer league games from Vegas, a time to speculate about final pieces to training-camp rosters, to cue up your favorite games from the previous year on YouTube, and to allow the baseball portion of your sporting soul to experience all the stress.
For Knicks fans, it means taking an early peek at Cam Payne’s impossible-to-duplicate jumper — and maybe remembering how often it improbably went in late in that series with the Sixers last year. It means daily progress reports on Tyler Kolek — it’s a matter of time before we call him “Jalen Junior” around here — and Pacome Dadiet.
Sure: it meant reading Stef Bondy’s dispatch in Wednesday’s Post about Isaiah Hartenstein legit pondering the possibility of taking a pay cut to stay a Knick, and maybe wanting to curse all things Oklahoman …
(Try this:
“Oooooooh!-klahoma …
“Where the Thunder scooped up Hartenstein
“And their wavin’ bucks
“Left our 5s in flux
“And a hole all along the Knicks’ frontline …)
But mostly, it’s time to speculate. It’s time to dream. That’s the fun of the NBA Power Ratings that are also in this paper, where we have the Knicks fourth, which seems about in line with what much of the preseason odds say. The consensus is the Celtics are favorites, as they should be. The Thunder are right there, with the Nuggets and Timberwolves in the West. The Sixers and Knicks are in a virtual heat for the fourth slot.
For the Knicks, who most oddsmakers put at either +800 or +825 at this point, that would be the most favorable preseason number since 2001, when they were +700 and a consensus Top 4 (in a season that would end with 48 wins, a first-round playoff loss to the Raptors and about a quarter century of darkness thereafter, give or take).
And it doesn’t matter if you never place a nickel up as a wager or curse every BetFanKings365 advertisement that litters your TV screen; that’s proof that the optimism surrounding the Knicks isn’t just a parochial thing. It’s not just around here where Mikal Bridges’ addition has been cheered, where Jalen Brunson’s contract has been lauded, where the retention of OG Anunoby and the return of Julius Randle is already the core of basketball talk in the teeth of baseball season.
The Knicks are a part of the national conversation.
You really have to go back a ways to find a time when that was so. They sure weren’t in the late ’90s and early aughts. Carmelo Anthony’s outlier 54-win season happened in the deepest shadow of the Heat mini-dynasty (and the Spurs’ actual one) and even if you go back to the early- and mid-’90s teams centered around Patrick Ewing, those teams always felt like reluctant substitutes by the networks, who quickly grew weary of 81-76 games and pined for the return of Michael Jordan.
And once you start backtracking you really don’t stop until you reach 1974 or so, when the championship teams were running on fumes, knocked the Bullets out of the playoffs out of habit and muscle memory before being cast away by the Celtics. Willis Reed and Dave DeBusschere retired immediately. The rest of the gang joined them soon enough. And the Knicks have mostly been a warm-up band ever since.
Again: that’s never been the case around here, where the Knicks remain a unifying element among most of the fans of a city who are otherwise divided along Yankees/Mets lines, Giants/Jets lines, or Rangers/Islanders/Devils lines.
(And no, that is not a gratuitous shot at the Nets, that’s simply a point of fact.)
This will all get trickier soon enough. The Knicks will be playing games before we know it. You will be fretting about injuries soon enough, and about this player griping about his minutes and that player bitching about his touches. A faction of you may even wait until November before calling for Tom Thibodeau’s job. That’ll all come soon enough.
For now, you get to relax. You get to talk yourselves into the Brunson/Randle/Bridges Big 3 being better than Embiid/Maxey/George. You get to fantasize about OG — a healthy OG — taking turns guarding Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown and Kristaps Porzingis some cold winter’s night. Maybe you can talk yourself into Jericho Sims showing up for training camp looking like an 85-percent version of Hartenstein, which would certainly qualify as a best-case scenario.
Good. This is the time for best-case scenarios. This is the time to be stress-free about losing streaks. This is the easy time if you are a Knicks fan. This is the fun time.
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