NEW YORK — Carmelo Anthony is in Oklahoma City, still trying to figure it all out with Russell Westbrook and Paul George. Phil Jackson is in Montana, counting his money. Derrick Rose is back in Cleveland physically, but maybe not mentally after making noises about walking away from basketball six short years after being the NBA’s MVP.
They’re all gone from New York and, as their early record shows, the Knicks are better off without any of them.
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It’s not just the surprising start, built largely on a favorable home-heavy schedule where the Knicks have played two-thirds of their games in Madison Square Garden. It’s how the team works now, how players are sharing the basketball to a degree their championship-starved fans haven’t seen since Pat Riley patrolled the Knick sidelines more than two decades ago. It’s how the Knicks have handed the reins to Kristaps Porzingis, and how he’s taken them and shown potential to be a real franchise player, only a few months after Jackson said he wasn’t ready to shoulder the load. It’s how they try to play defense, although sometimes it’s hit and miss.
It’s all quiet on the social media front, for once. There are no more tweets emanating from the team president’s suite and flying across the bow of the team’s best player. In that respect, the Knicks have become dull. It’s all about wins and losses now, with very little happening off the floor moving the needle, even the slightest. No player has gone AWOL, as Rose did last season. There is no more daily soap opera for the tabloids’ back pages to feast on, but that means that the Knicks have taken a major step toward regaining a degree of respectability.
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They’ve done it with a new administration led by president Steve Mills and general manager Scott Perry. They were not team owner James Dolan’s first choice. Dolan had one of his most trusted allies, entertainment executive Irving Azoff, talk to Jerry West to see if the NBA legend wanted to take over for Jackson last June, league sources with knowledge of the discussions told Sporting News. Azoff brought Dolan and Jackson together in 2014, but in this instance, West told Azoff that the time wasn’t right to come to New York. Instead he opted to settle into an advisory role to Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.
Eric Spoelstra knows what it’s like to be caught between a marquee team president, in his case Riley, and the game’s premier player, LeBron James. Any disagreements between those two heavyweights during LeBron’s four-year run in Miami were mostly kept behind the scenes, as opposed to what played out in a very public showdown between Jackson and Anthony last season.
"Now, it’s a more stable environment around here and that is going to help any team," Spoelstra said during the Heat’s recent visit into the Garden. "That makes for a big difference. Stability, in this league, is the biggest factor in getting consistency."
Without Jackson’s sniping, the Knicks seem to be more professionally-run, at the very least. According to several players, there’s been a positive trickle-down effect.
"The atmosphere is a lot better," swingman Courtney Lee said late after the Knicks’ pounding of the undermanned Heat. "It’s always good to have good air. It’s easier to operate as a team, 100 percent, 100 percent, 100 percent. Every day there’s not something new in the media, about what’s being said about who. The whole situation wasn’t good. It was not good air. But now, the air is clear. It makes it easier to play now. I just wish ‘Melo was still here so he could be a part of it."
Clearly, both the Knicks and Anthony had to move on, just as Jackson had to go after a disastrous 39-month run. Both made their millions and had little to show for it, other than producing four straight lottery finishes and one of the worst three-year stretches in the long history of the Knicks. Who won the trade with the Thunder? Let’s just say it’s not looking nearly as one-sided as it did when Anthony got his wish to go to a potential title contender in exchange for Enes Kanter, Doug McDermott and a second-round draft pick that once belonged to the Bulls.
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With his scoring and relentless offensive rebounding, Kanter has emerged as one of the top four players. Porzingis leads the way, of course. Then comes their big summer free-agent acquisition, Tim Hardaway Jr., who has been slow to justify the nearly $18 million per season the Knicks gave him. Lee, a solid journeyman, rounds out the group. The Knicks aren’t under any illusions, as they start rebuilding in the post-Anthony era. They believe all four have to perform at a high level to give the team a chance to win.
But Porzingis has endured a litany of injuries, more than just the usual bumps and bruises. He’s never played a full season, missing 30 games so far in his NBA career. He’s now recovering from when his ankle gruesomely bent and touched the court after stepping on the foot of Miami’s Justise Winslow. And Hardaway now is coping with a stress injury to his lower left leg that has KO’d him from action.
When the 7-3 Porzingis is on the floor, moving like a guard and with an impossible shot to block, good things generally happen. For the most part, the ball moves, the Knicks trust one another. Their 23.3 assists per game, good for seventh in the NBA, is their best level of teamwork at the offensive end since 1994, the year Riley guided them to the NBA Finals.
It’s keeping Porzingis on the court that can be problematic. He’s going to have to show that he can stay healthy when he gets back, because starting Dec. 27, the Knicks set off on a killer 20-game stretch. From that date through Feb. 2, 16 of their games are on the road. So far, the homecourt edge has skewed their record. When the week began, they had played more home games than any other team and were 10-5 in the Garden. But they also had played fewer road games than anyone else — seven -— and were only 1-6 away from New York before Monday night's 115-97 loss in Indiana.
There’s an old adage that NBA teams take on the personality of their best player. For the Knicks, they’ve emerged from the iso-dominant, ball-sticking approach with Anthony as their top gun to a more pass-oriented team under Porzingis. In practice, one of Jeff Hornacek’s featured daily drills challenges the Knicks to see how many passes they can make in a 15-second span before getting off a shot. When ‘Melo was in town, they didn’t practice that drill once.
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Now able to coach the way he wants and give his players the green light to take the first good shot, Hornacek has returned Jackson’s slow-paced, methodical triangle offense to the mothballs.
"You look at their team and it’s like a whole new approach versus what we saw in the past," Trail Blazers coach Terry Stotts said. "They’re a younger team. They’re playing with more energy. The ball moves. They’ve got a lot of energy on their wings. I don’t think anybody was holding Porzingis back when Carmelo was here. That was just the natural pecking order. But now, there’s been a shift in some direction to Porzingis, because he’s their new top player. And he’s going to be something else."
How fast? Much will depend on whether he can stay on the court and what happens in the backcourt, where the veteran Jarrett Jack has been a stabilizing force but has been limited by past knee and Achilles injuries. Jackson’s final move, drafting French product Frank Ntilikina with the No. 8 overall pick to be the team’s future playmaker, is not looking very promising.
As much as Knicks fans have to give Jackson his due for taking an unknown Porzingis with the fourth pick in the 2015 NBA Draft, they could be left pondering what this team could have looked like had Jackson taken Dennis Smith Jr. last June instead of Ntilikina, who has had nothing but trouble getting the Knicks into their offense. He doesn’t see the floor very well, can only go to his right and hasn’t fooled any defenses doing just that. More of a wing player when he played overseas in a free-flowing offense, he’s been completely lost trying to run the most basic version of an NBA pick-and-roll. Ergo, his limited bench role.
Ntilikina is only 19 years old and has shown flashes of brilliance on the defensive end, so it's far too early for any bust talk. Plus, the rookie guard actually has a chance to succeed in this environment. Imagine saying that last season.
The ball is moving, Knicks fans are cheering like they’re watching a playoff team and nobody is missing Jackson or Anthony. You can alert TMZ: Breaking news! The circus has left town.
Listen to Mitch Lawrence on SiriusXM NBA Radio on The Starting Lineup, Above The Rim, NBA Today and NBA Weekend. Follow him on Twitter: @Mitch_Lawrence.
