This is on everyone, owner on down, everyone who has conspired to turn the Knicks franchise into a deplorable joke, something beyond pity. This? This is as disgraceful as professional sports gets. This is as despicable as it gets.
“It’s sickening,” Knicks coach David Fizdale said, but at least he got paid Thursday night. So did all the players who barely broke a sweat in no-showing against the Denver Nuggets. So did the Knicks’ brass, Scott Perry and Steve Mills, who put together this jigsaw-puzzle-from-hell of a roster, falling behind by 40 points — 40! — for a second straight game before rallying at the end to make it 129-92.
And so, of course, did James L. Dolan, owner, whose wretched excuse for a basketball team still managed to draw 18,171 suckers to Madison Square Garden, all of them paying full freight, most of them kicking in for $10 hot dogs and $12 beers.
A day after Mets fans ran around New York like hostages freed from a bunker, painting the town their shade of orange and blue thanks to the news that their ownership is going to change — eventually, anyway — Knicks fans are forced to ponder the reality that things have never felt worse around the Garden of Cedin’.
Mostly, because things never have been worse.
Although there’s always tomorrow. And next week.
This is the first time in Knicks history — a history that dates to 1946 — they have lost by 30 or more points in back-to-back games. Think about that for a second. They are actually three games worse than last year’s team, a team whose unstated mission was to finish as close to 0-82 as humanly possible. This time, we are told, they are trying.
Only it’s impossible to tell. It’s one thing to be bad — Knicks fans have seen so many bad teams the past 20 years, they could teach a Ph.D.-level class on the subject of bad basketball. It’s something else to play as if you’d rather be somewhere else. The Knicks, of course, will tell you that is neither true nor fair.
They need to watch the tape of this game. They need to see how the Nuggets — a middling 3-point shooting team across their first 18 games — knocked down 21 out of 39 Thursday night, mostly because just about every one of them was wide open. Not an exaggeration. Not a lie. Wide. Bleepin’. Open.
They need to see the times that four Knicks surround one Nugget and one loose ball — and the Nugget somehow snatched every one, every single one, despite being up 15, 20, 30, 40 points.
There is no excuse for that, and that falls on Fizdale. There was some intrigue after the game because Dolan and Perry abandoned their courtside seats in the game’s final minutes, and Dolan, according to a witness, entered the Knicks’ locker room.
But at 10:03 p.m., it was Fizdale who stepped into the interview room to take the full dose of medicine.
“I’m still coaching this team,” he said. “I’m still pushing them, still preparing them. We had a hell of a practice before this one.”
Of course they did. They always do. We’ve heard for 13 straight weeks how magnificent the Giants look in practice, how confident the Jets look in practice, and then they turn the scoreboard on every Sunday and the teams render their coaches liars and con artists. The football season has been a scorched-earth, end-to-end disaster around here.
And yet it feels like 1969 compared to this.
“We’re not putting this on Fiz,” Julius Randle said. “We have to perform better. But it has been a tough week for sure.”
A tough week? Forgive Randle, he’s new here. This has been 20 years of mangled highway, all of it on Dolan’s watch, much of it on Mills’ watch. Perry wants us to trust the process, Sixers-style, but he’s the one who assembled this collection of low-energy power forwards, and he’s also responsible for Fizdale.
Before now, it was easy to feel a thread of mercy for the coach, who was given an impossible task last year and doesn’t exactly have the ’96 Bulls at his disposal this year. And he sure did get a lot of credit for some early losses that ended badly. Really, the only way he could become the biggest target in town is for his team to quit on him.
And so we are here.
We are at 4-18, and eight losses in a row, with no reason to believe that trend is going to reverse itself anytime soon. We are at an angry Garden, too beaten down to boo, too chapped to chant, the fury delivered by the stream to the exits all across the fourth quarter.
Blame everyone: the overmatched coach, the outmaneuvered front office, the outwitted owner. The Knicks play no D, but when you spin the thesaurus, they sure do land on D a lot: Deplorable. Disgraceful. Despicable.
Disgusting.