NEW YORK — After a loss that came on the fifth anniversary of his trade to New York, as reporters gathered at his locker, normally accommodating Carmelo Anthony begged off the post-game interview, explaining that he needed to “go home, relax and decompress a little bit.”
That sounds like the best move for all Knicks and Nets fans, as the Big Apple is closing out what is its worst professional basketball season ever. Historically, it doesn’t get any worse than 2015-16.
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Here’s why: For the first time since the Nets came into the NBA in 1976-77, both franchises will finish with losing records, miss the playoffs and — drum roll, please — not even have their own first-round draft picks, precious lottery picks, to help ease the pain and accelerate the rebuilding.
That’s a losing Tri-fecta, if we’ve ever seen one.
That last part is where this season, when both teams fired their coaches, gets even worse for the two New York teams: The two playoff-bound Atlantic Division teams the Knicks and Nets are chasing, Toronto and Boston, own their first-round picks in June’s draft. So while the New York teams will be shut out for a lottery pick, barring a trade, the Raptors and Celtics should each be able to add young, talented piece to their rosters.
Now you can see why Anthony has dealt with migraine headaches. Are they bad enough that he’d waive his no-trade clause? As someone who knows how important playing and living in New York is to his brand and life, I’ll answer that this way: Let’s not get hysterical.
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But for now, it’s just a pro basketball disaster in New York. The Nets are 19-51 and in 14th place in the Eastern Conference, while the Knicks have faded from playoff contention to 13th at 28-43.
Only five other times have both sets of New York (or, as was the case for the Nets for so many years, New Jersey) arenas been dark when the NBA playoffs started. The first time both franchises missed the playoffs was 1979-80, then again in 1986-87. And then there was the bleakest three-year stretch in New York history: 2007-08 through 2009-10. In those three seasons, neither team won more than 34 games in the regular-season and the Nets of 2009-10 won only 12, their all-time low.
At least the teams of those eras had their draft picks, with only the Knicks in 2010 not having a first-round selection. Now neither will be able to capitalize on their losing seasons this June, and it’s something that is starting to get some buzz around the league.
“When the Knicks, Nets, Lakers and Philly are all bad at the same time, it definitely hurts the league,” one Western Conference executive told Sporting News. “To have both teams in New York in down cycles at the same time and without No. 1 picks, that’s a bad situation for us all. At least the Lakers have good young talent and it looks like they’ll have a top-three pick. But what can you say about the Knicks and Nets? One thing: They better get some really good players in free agency.”
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It’s important to remember how these teams ended up throwing away their No. 1 picks, without all-important lottery protections that most NBA teams require in trades.
Three years ago, coming off their 54-win season when they advanced to the second round of the playoffs, the Knicks shipped off a future first-rounder to acquire Andrea Bargnani from Toronto. Glen Grunwald was the Knicks’ general manager at the time, so you can’t pin this misstep on current Knicks president Phil Jackson.
Grunwald was counting on 7-foot Bargnani, a former No. 1 overall pick with perimeter skills, to provide an additional scoring option and keep double-teams off Anthony. But it turned out to be a major miscalculation on Grunwald’s part, when you consider what he gave up. Bargnani turned out to be an oft-injured bust, missing more than half the games in his two seasons with the team. Once his contract expired last summer, Jackson let him walk.
(The Knicks’ gamble came with the knowledge that the Nuggets already had the right to swap picks with New York in 2016 as part of the Anthony trade. What no one likely counted on was the Knicks and Nuggets both being so bad that the worse of the two picks would stay valuable.)
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Two weeks before the Knicks got Bargnani, the Nets’ traded their 2016 first-rounder pick during a time when owner Mikhail Prokhorov was pushing his basketball executives toward a flawed get-rich-quick scheme to build a contender. All draft picks were available for the taking, and by the time GM Billy King finished his wheeling and dealing, the Nets had no control over their own No. 1 pick until 2019, making it a challenging rebuild for rookie GM Sean Marks.
“Draft picks are one way to build a team, but there are several other places and other ways to go out there and do it,” Marks said at his introductory press conference last month.
Marks will have look to free agency primarily because King used three first-rounders and several pick swap rights to get Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in 2013. The leaders of the 2008 Celtics championship run were long past their primes, but the Nets felt that they’d provide necessary leadership, valuable playoff experience and maybe even have some turn-back-the-clock playoff moments for coach Jason Kidd.
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The Nets did get to the second round in 2014, where they lost to the eventual champion Heat in five games. But then Pierce left for Washington as a free agent, Kidd was fired in a botched power-play to get King’s job and landed in Milwaukee, and Garnett ended up getting sent back to Minnesota, his original team, in 2015. The original trade turned out to be a heist-for-the-ages for Celtics president Danny Ainge.
Meanwhile, here in New York, we’re coming to the end of another bad New York basketball season. Sad to report, it’s the worst one in history.
