Garden of Ghosts (Part I)
Linsanity, Wishing Upon a Star, and A Franchise Trapped in a Cycle of Spiritual Poverty
Preface: This is part one of what I believe will be a two-part series about the spiritual ramifications of the RJ-Barrett-Immanuel-Quickley-OG-Anunoby trade. In this part, I don’t actually get to the trade. But it’s coming. And it’s all connected…
I
On Saturday, February 5th, 2012, I played ultimate frisbee in the park with a group of friends and our dads. You should immediately be skeptical of this claim. This was 12 years ago, I have no photos, emails, or texts to back this up, and we played ultimate frisbee often enough for it to not be noteworthy, but not often enough for there to be a discernible or memorable pattern. I can’t remember anything about that game, or anything else that happened that day. But it must have been that day, because February 4th, 2012 must have been the day before, and I do vividly remember Marcus (one of the cool, older kids, more my sister’s friend than mine) asking the group whether we’d seen the Knicks game last night. None of us had. “That’s a shame,” Marcus said. “This guy Jeremy Lin came off the bench and scored 25 points. I don’t think they’ve ever played him before. It was crazy.”
This can’t have made much of an impression on any of us at the time, because the Knicks were too depressing to care about. After an awful 2009-10, they’d managed to squeeze their way into mediocrity by signing All-Star power-forward Amare Stoudemire, and three months later, trading a bountiful cornucopia of young players and picks to the Denver Nuggets for second-team All-NBA small-forward Carmelo Anthony. Stoud and Melo represented the most fearsome duo the team had seen in decades, the brightest, shiniest young stars money could buy. They went 42-40 in 2010-11, and were unceremoniously swept by the Boston Celtics in the first round of the playoffs. After starting the 2011-12 season on a similar pace of mediocrity, they fell into a tailspin, losing eleven of thirteen in the second half of January to reach a record of 8-15, good for tenth place in the conference, and three games out of playoff contention. Knicks fans had plenty of practice with outrageous hope evaporating into nothing, but the speed of this particular cycle was galling. It was better not to watch too closely, even if that meant occasionally missing a fifth-string point guard heroically drag the team to a narrow victory against the even-worse New Jersey Nets. How crazy could that really be?
The Knicks decided to see, bumping him into the starting lineup. Lin scored 136 points in the next five games (the most in a player’s first five starts in NBA history), all wins, as part of a 10-3 run that included lockdown defense on Wizards No.1 overall draft pick phenom John Wall, a game-winning isolation pull-up buzzer-beater three against the Raptors, and a 38-point game against Kobe Bryant and the Lakers in a sold-out, delirious Madison Square Garden. On February 3rd, Jeremy Lin was a complete unknown, the fifth-string point guard of a very bad team, on the verge of falling out of the league entirely after a brief and forgettable career. On March 3rd, he was indisputably the best player on the hottest team in the league. He would go on to captivate the nation, winning not just back-to-back covers of Sports Illustrated Magazine, but also an invite to the Time 100 Gala. The Jeremy Lin Knicks jersey was the best selling jersey in the league, a league with Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, and Carmelo Anthony, for the months of February and March of 2012. When ESPN’s Rachel Nichols got Lin to sit for a pre-game interview on February 20th, his celebrity was so great that he felt he needed to put to rest some of the more outrageous rumors that had begun to circulate. “No,” he told her. “I’m not secretly dating Kim Kardashian.”
Though it never amounted to anything (Lebron and the Heat bounced the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs, then the Rockets signed Lin away in free agency, where he faded back into relative obscurity), Linsanity brought endless joy to Knicks fans. Because at its core, what made it special, what made it truly insane, was not that the NBA’s first American-born player of Chinese or Taiwanese descent, who was also the first NBA player to graduate from Harvard since 1951, transformed from benchwarmer to elite, unguardable point guard messiah. It was that the Knicks finally had a young prospect lead them to a winning season, something we hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, and haven’t seen since.
II
More than any other, the modern NBA is a star-driven league. Statistically, there’s a much wider talent gap between the good and the great. Last year, Shohei Ohtani was worth about 10 wins above replacement (WAR) to the Los Angeles Angels, making him far and away the most valuable player in the MLB. According to Nate Silver’s RAPTOR model, Nikola Jokic was worth 20, while Luka Doncic, Joel Embiid, Damien Lillard, Jimmy Butler, Kyrie Irving, Fred VanVleet, Shai Gilgeous Alexander, and Anthony Davis were all worth 10 or more.1
The league’s salary structure exacerbates this talent gap. By rule, teams have a salary cap, and cannot pay a player more than “the max,” or 30% of the salary cap.2 But stars like Jokic, Doncic, and Embiid are worth much more than their 30% max,3 so they are not only the most valuable players in the league but the most valuable contracts. The way to be the best in a salary cap league is to find players who agree to play for you for much less than they are worth, and paradoxically, it turns out that the most underpaid players are the most expensive ones.4
Fans can feel this psychologically. When you root for a team with an incandescent star, you feel like you can beat anyone on any given night, because you know that when he’s playing his best, your guy is simply unstoppable. When you root for a team without one, no matter how skilled, hard-working, well-constructed, or well-coached they may be, you know in the back of your mind that it’s all futile, and that sooner or later you’ll run up against someone else’s unstoppable star,5 and that will be that.
This dynamic gives stars tremendous power over their circumstances. When a star becomes a free agent, teams stoop to incredible lengths to woo them, clearing out cap space years in advance, preemptively signing their friends or siblings, or recording a custom-made viral pop song in the star’s honor. In recent years, teams have sought to avoid free agency, where they can lose a player for nothing if the pop song and other wooing techniques fail, opting instead to trade their stars for enormous packages of draft picks and prospects while they are still under contract. But a team is often only willing to give up such a package if they think they have a good chance of getting the star to extend their contract with the new team. In practice, this usually means that whenever he feels like it, a star can demand a trade, indicate a list of preferred destinations, and be traded to one of them.6
A bad team will not attract a star in free agency, no matter how catchy their pop song may be. But more importantly for the modern NBA, a bad team will never be a preferred destination for a star in a trade. The league offers the perennially bad team only one hope of getting their star: the draft. Each year, the worst teams get first dibs on the chance to sign the promising teenager of their choice to a four-year7 “rookie-scale” (aka cheap) contract, which means they have four years to develop their draft pick into a star, build a team around him, and convince him to sign a maximum (but still undervalued) long-term extension. Of course, most teams fail to do this; only two or three players per draft end up becoming maximum-salary stars. But a good front-office with a few years of top-ten draft picks will usually end up with one. A great front office will end up with more than one, while a truly blessed front office will end up drafting Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green in the span of four years. As of the 2022 offseason, the Knicks had not drafted anyone who agreed to extend past the four-year rookie deal since they drafted Patrick Ewing in 1985.
III
The 21st century Knicks jettisoned many of their best draft picks to acquire shiny stars like Carmelo Anthony, less shiny ones like Eddy Curry, and not-at-all-shiny, obviously-bad, seriously-how-did-the-league-not-veto-this-trade dudes like Andrea Bargnani. The Knicks squandered most of their remaining picks, some of them quite high up in the first round, on middling role-players like Tim Hardaway Jr, Danilo Galinari, and Imam Shumpert (all quickly traded away for more shiny, expensive, usually completely useless ex-stars), or straightforwardly inept dropouts like Jordan Hill, Frank Ntilikina, and Kevin Knox.
During this time, they hit on exactly one draft pick, Kristaps Porzingis. In his brief Knicks tenure, Porzingis showed flashes of being truly unstoppable on offense, then tore his ACL, noticed during his eighteen-month absence the team’s utter inability to field even a semi-competent team, and demanded a trade. The Knicks complied, and refused to replace him so that they could leave space in their payroll for incoming free agents Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. The resulting team went 17-65, the very worst in the league, with the hope of drafting generational prospect, Duke freshman Zion Williamson. Then, Durant and Irving spurned the Knicks (obviously), and both signed with the Brooklyn Nets instead. The Pelicans and Grizzlies jumped the Knicks in the NBA Draft Lottery, and the Knicks were left with Zion’s lesser teammate, a scrawny nineteen-year old wing named RJ Barrett. RJ had an abysmal rookie year, with an ugly jumpshot and clumsy defensive footwork. The entire saga was emblematic of a Knicks franchise, still one of the most valuable of any sports team in market cap, that nonetheless seemed to be trapped in a kind of cycle of poverty. Since Ewing’s departure, they never had stars, or even particularly good players, and were stuck continuously eating their seed corn by trading away draft assets for players, which just made them worse, which in turn seemed to make them more desperate to trade everything for a star. And when they kept their picks and held onto the players they drafted, they were terrible, or injured, or unhappy, or all three. Since 1985, there had been not one single success story of a drafted, home-grown Knick.
Madison Square Garden is nicknamed “the Mecca,” the promised land of the sport, where great players must pay homage to the heroes of the past. The name conjures up not just historical significance but current relevance and urgency into the future, that this must be a place where the flames of the religion of basketball are continuously stoked in perpetuity.8 When the Knicks are terrible, and not just terrible as part of a rebuild but terrible in a cyclic, self-sustaining, seemingly permanent way, the Mecca becomes less relevant, and the religion of basketball suffers. Breaking the Knicks out of their cycle of poverty is not just the desire of New Yorkers, but subconsciously, the spiritual need of basketball fans everywhere. Linsanity fulfilled that need, briefly, but true satisfaction could only come when the Knicks broke their curse, and finally retained a player that they drafted.
And remember, the NBA season is half as long as the MLB season, so wins are twice as valuable towards the team’s playoff chances. For a true apples-to-apples comparison, I’d have to list every NBA player with at least 5 WAR, and there were more than 50 of those. If you trust this model, Shohei Ohtani helped the Angels’ playoff chances about as much as Hawks center Clint Capela helped theirs. Neither the Hawks nor the Angels came particularly close to making the playoffs.
Everything in this sentence is almost true, but there are tons of crazy rules and exceptions that even the most ardent basketball fans don’t completely understand. There is a cap, but 28 of 30 teams are spending more than it this year, which is okay as long as they are under the “hard cap,” which is also sometimes called the “first apron,” because there’s also a “second apron,” which you have to be under if you aren’t under the first apron and there are all sorts of taxes and sanctions you face for being above or below them at the wrong times. And there is a “max” contract you can offer a player, 30% of the cap, but there’s also a “supermax” which is 35%, and you get to do it only for very special players, under a full moon, if Adam Silver approves of the blood sacrifice you have brought to his lair. Or something like that.
35% supermax!!!! And it’s much more complicated than that! But they’re all still vastly underpaid.
Of course, the most expensive ones could also turn out to be garbage, and then you’re stuck wasting 35% of the salary cap on a permanently injured John Wall or a cartoonishly self-sabotaging Russell Westbrook, or in the Knicks case, signing Joakim Noah to such a debilitatingly generous contract that they are still paying it off 8 years later, Bobby Bonilla style. The point is that just because the most undervalued players are expensive, it doesn’t mean that expensive players are always undervalued. Some of them suck.
Such as Trae Young in 2021 and Jimmy Butler in 2023 for the Knicks.
With exceptions. Damian Lillard demanded to be traded to the Heat, but the Bucks offered the Blazers a better package so he ended up there instead. Lillard has three more years on his contract, so the Bucks have perhaps a year and a half to convince Lillard to re-sign. Otherwise, he will demand another trade, and the Bucks will have wasted a tremendous amount of draft capital on a very brief window of his time. So far, though, it seems to be going pretty well for them. But this only works because the Bucks were already a very good team, credibly a championship contender. Lillard would not have stuck around on a bad team even if they had enough assets to get him.
The team gets to opt out in years three and four, and then can also make something called a “qualifying offer” in year five. I don’t know why everything has to be so complicated!
Are there continuously stoked flames at the real Mecca? Seems not. Whatever .