When you look at the words now, you aren’t sure whether to shake with laughter or to shudder with melancholy. Were we that delusional? Were they? Are we so desperate for the Knicks to be relevant again that we’re so willing to swallow our common sense?
Isiah Thomas, Jan. 5, 2004:
“We judged Stephon pretty harshly when he was 21 years old. I think he’s a different man at 26, not only as a basketball player but as a person. Maturity is a wonderful thing.”
Stephon Marbury, Jan. 7, 2004:
“Being a kid from New York, people don’t understand what it’s like to be a Knicks fan. Even as a professional basketball player, just the tradition of the Knicks runs in your blood. People always say to me, ‘You may be in Phoenix, or you may be in New Jersey, but your blood bleeds orange.”’
Oh, we ate that up, all right. It was going to be different for Isiah this time, different than it had been in Toronto, or in Indiana, or with NBC, or with the CBA. It was going to be different for Steph this time, different than it had been in Minnesota, or New Jersey, or Phoenix.
The two of them have lived so much of their professional lives on spec, with people believing that the future was bound to be better than the past, that whatever ills may have dogged them before were sure to go away now. Why in the world we ever thought that would be the case with the Knicks, at Madison Square Garden – an incubator for rabid, uncontrolled incompetence – is hard to fathom.
Really, from the start, this was a marriage consummated in hell, and it has only grown more and more unpleasant. Now Marbury gets back on a plane and heads out west, Thomas welcomes him back to his injury-depleted morass of a team, he plays him 34 minutes in an 84-81 loss to the Clippers at the Staples Center, and it is yet another floor down on an elevator ride through a bottomless pit of basketball misery.
“I want the best for this team,” Thomas said 90 minutes before game time. “I want the best for everyone in that locker room. And sometimes there are hard lessons to be learned.”
You know what? It’s right that it plays out this way. It’s right that after the way Isiah has ransacked this franchise, stripped the soul clear from the place, that it would be Marbury who would bring him down. And make no mistake: when it ends for Thomas – and for the first time ever, it does seem like there may well be an endgame in sight – he can thank Marbury for finally giving him one final shove off the ledge.
The day Thomas was hired, remember, he’d promised instant gratification. “The mindset around here has to change,” he said on Dec. 22, 2003, which we can now look back on as the day the Garden music began to die. “This needs to get done, and get done quickly.”
Exactly two weeks later, Marbury was a Knick, meaning that exactly two weeks later, the entire culture surrounding the Knicks started forming in Marbury’s sour, dour image – and with Thomas’ eternal blessing. If there is one thing we have learned from this nearly four-year partnership, it is that Thomas never has much minded enabling his petulant star in every way conceivable. He hired Marbury’s underqualified cousin. He looked the other way at some abhorrent Marbury behavior.
He squirmed as Marbury uttered the now-famous words “get in the truck,” while he was allegedly serving as a character witness for him.
And now he is faced with a myriad of choices about Marbury, none of them desirable. He can welcome him back, act as if nothing has happened, and officially torch whatever credibility he had left in his own locker room. He can try to trade him, which should be fun with more than $40 million left on Marbury’s deal. He can buy him out, adding Marbury to the list of millions he’s wasted at Penn Plaza.
Isiah Thomas, Jan. 5, 2004: “This could be he beginning of something awfully special.”
Stephon Marbury, Jan. 7, 2004: “I can’t wait to put that uniform on.”
They deserved each other. Everyone else who believed what they were selling? You deserved so much more. You deserve so much better.
Maybe someday you’ll even get it. Maybe.