We have committed to heart the best-case scenario for which the Knicks are wishing upon a star to rejoin the land of the basketball living. It is a simple, three-part plan that goes something like this:
1. Win (or at least place) in the draft lottery, meaning that if you don’t get Zion Williamson you can draft his Duke teammate, RJ Barrett, who in some minds is actually the better player with the higher ceiling.
2. Discover that all of the hopeful buzz surrounding Kevin Durant is for real, and that Durant really is intrigued (some say infatuated) with the idea of Mark-Messiering the Knicks out of their 46-year hike through the basketball wilderness.
3. Coax a sidekick to join Durant, and in almost every scenario that’s been proposed and pitched and dreamed about since the Great Porzingis Exile on the final day of January, it is Kyrie Irving that would seem to best serve as Robin to Durant’s Batman, Costanza to his Seinfeld, Silvio to his Tony Soprano.
It is a fine plan, and a fun plan, and it is a plan that never looked better and more appealing than on Sunday, when it seemed for a time the Knicks were either going to a) surrender 200 points or b) lose by 100 points before settling in on the business end of a 128-107 hammering at the hands of the Clippers in Los Angeles.
Of course, we are discovering it isn’t exactly a perfect plan.
The lottery, of course, could be a fiasco, and let’s be very honest: If the Lakers don’t make the playoffs would it surprise you — or anyone else — if they were the team that got the frozen envel— um, I mean the winning number combination?
Durant could take a good, hard look at the Knicks and say: “Hmmmm …”
And then there is Kyrie, who three years ago made the most important hoop in the entire basketball history of Cleveland, Ohio, who has hinted often that he dreams of playing at least a portion of his prime at the Garden, which sits just 19.8 miles from his boyhood home in West Orange, N.J., who is one of the NBA’s brilliant talents …
And who is … well, in the midst of a troubling stretch of professional highway.
It isn’t just that the Celtics — for whom he plays a starring role, and for whom a place in the NBA Finals seemed a foregone conclusion just four months ago — have been a major disappointment, buried at No. 5 in the East. It isn’t just that Irving has remained reasonably healthy (a chronic challenge for him going back to his Duke years) yet has had large swatches of time this year where he has played lackadaisically and seemed downright disinterested (despite averaging team highs of 23.9 points and 6.9 assists).
But things have gotten increasingly — what’s the word? Weird? Troubling? Uncomfortable? — between Irving and the Celtics. A report from The Ringer emerged Monday citing a team source describing Irving as “disengaged and detached” from the team. After Sunday’s latest Celtics calamity, a 115-104 home loss to the Rockets, Irving muttered, “I’m not going to miss any of this [crap] when I’m done playing.”
Now, stars get testy sometimes. And when they have reached their breaking point in one city, sometimes they don’t have the energy or inclination to hide that (unless you’ve forgotten the final days of LeBron I in Cleveland in 2010). And that doesn’t have to mean that unhappiness will carry over (LeBron seemed perfectly content making four straight Finals, winning two of them, in Miami the next four years).
But it certainly bears watching, and closely, how Irving handles the next few weeks. Remember, it isn’t like the glare is going to be any less withering in New York, and even if he arrives in the company of KD and RJ, that Knicks team is still going to be less, at the start, than this Celtics team is.
Knicks fans surely have to like their chances of luring Irving given the fact that he seems so deliriously unhappy in Boston. Should that enthusiasm be measured by what we’ve seen from him this year though? And can the Knicks even afford the luxury of worrying about any of that as they try to assemble a team on the fly out of so many moving parts?
It is the Knicks, after all. You knew this wasn’t going to be easy, right?
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