The franchise that wins or dies trying tops the one that’s got everything figured out except winning
The New York Knicks defeated the Philadelphia 76ers 125-119 in overtime last night. The 76ers lost without Joel Embiid because of the culture they’ve built the past 10 years. The Knicks won without Karl-Anthony Towns because of the culture they’ve built the past five. Those cultures can be defined and distinguished by two bigs who weren’t even there last night.
Julius Randle was in Minnesota, scoring 17 in his team’s loss to Golden State. Jahlil Okafor scored a dozen the night before in a win for the G League’s Indiana Mad Ants. Randle may end up having a direct impact on this Knick season, given his Timberwolves visit Madison Square Garden tomorrow night and he may be slightly motivated to kick some ass all over the place. Okafor may seem too off the radar to ever circle back, but Knicks fans should know better than any that postseason injuries cause all kinds of strange bedfellows. Sometimes an elimination game features heavy doses of the Billy Walkers and Alec Burkseseses of the world. You know how most Americans are a hospitalization away from poverty? The Pacers are a Myles Turner/Isaiah Jackson double whammy from the likes of Okafor.
One reason the Knicks won last night without Towns is because Jalen Brunson is an MVP-caliber player who played like it. You may recall when the Knicks first signed Brunson from Dallas, a lotta people thought four years and $104 million was an overpay, and a bad one. The Knicks’ coaches and front office saw something that others didn’t. They could have passed on Brunson, held on to that money until an obvious nine-figure free agent came along and signed him instead. That’s probably what the Sixers would have done.
When Philadelphia’s “Process” started a little over 10 years ago, they traded young star guard Jrue Holiday to New Orleans for the draft rights to a center, Nerlens Noel, who’d torn his left ACL a few months earlier. Still, the Sixers figured a process by which they multiplied one archetype after another, one probability of success after another, couldn’t help but pay off. So a year after drafting a center who’d miss his entire rookie year, they drafted one who’d miss his first two years entirely in Embiid. A year after Embiid, they not only drafted Okafor, another center, but followed that up with a pair of 2nd-round picks who were also both bigs: OAKAAKUYOAK Willy Hernangomez and Richaun Holmes. Just to make sure nobody missed the kink, Philly used the top pick in 2016 on the 6-foot-10 Ben Simmons.
Look: size can matter. If that’s your thing, that’s your thing. The Knicks will probably play Towns and Mitchell Robinson together at some point this season, assuming Mitch ever returns from the dead. The two best teams in the league so far, Cleveland and Oklahoma City, both start a pair of centers. It’s not like size in and of itself is a problem.
In Philadelphia’s case, a culture that begins with “It’s fine if we don’t even try to win for half a decade; we’re just smarter than everyone else” is how you end up with nights like they did in last spring’s playoffs and last night’s contest, with their homecourt sounding like Madison Square Garden West: MVP chants for Brunson; “Deuce!” chants for Miles McBride, the loudest cheers in the overtime coming when the Knicks did something good. It’s the same logic that led them to draft Okafor, which is the same logic that’s led them to where they’ve gotten after more than a decade into the process — never past the second round.
When you try to be too clever by half, you start needing all kinds of undeserved breaks to go your way. You know it when you tell a lie, or know you should leave to be somewhere on time but you delay and start late: that first risky decision adds stakes and tension to all the decisions that follow. Drafting any big man high in the lottery carries risk; drafting one with a significant injury only magnifies it; drafting two in a row? Followed by not one, not two, not three, but four more who all play roughly the same position? At that point you’re counting on the gods to bail you out.
Spoiler: the gods do not like teams not trying for half-decades.
Spoiler: the gods did not bail them out.
The Sixers’ second-best player is Tyrese Maxey, a terrific young talent who would have been perfect for them before he got there. Maybe there were guards they could have drafted in place of all the bigs they did. But their culture told them not to think for themselves, not to go with their gut, not to consider the team as a holistic whole. The Sixers fell victim to the same illogic parroted here after every Isiah Thomas trade: “We got the biggest name/best talent in the deal! We won!” Thus the utterly uncritical cheerleading when they signed Paul George to a max deal, a 34-year-old renowned as much for his injuries and playoff shortcomings as his game.
Here are the Sixers, nine games below .500 near the halfway mark. Embiid’s missed their last six games and two-thirds of the season. George has missed a third of them. Those two combined will earn over $400 million the next four seasons, assuming Embiid and George pick up player options the last year of their deals for $67 million and $56 million. They will. Okafor was the point in trusting the process where they should have trusted themselves instead. You ever hear if you’re taking a multiple choice and you’re not sure the answer, pick C? There’s supposedly some logic to that. But if you run wild with it and pick C for every single answer, you’re setting yourself up to fail. The Sixers chose C after C after C for years. You reap what you sow.
When the Knicks signed Randle, he was not probability’s best path to glory. They franchise was supposed to be embarrassed they passed on Kevin Durant, which has always been weird to me — this wasn’t prime-of-his-life LeBron snickering at Donnie Walsh and that mortifying Sopranos recruitment video before blowing the Knicks off. The Knicks, like the Sixers, could have been dogmatic. There was mutual interest that whole season up with KD, up until he tore his Achilles in the Finals. By Sixer logic, the Knicks should have ignored that and taken the plunge, figuring even a year sans KD coupled with Kyrie Irving was worth whatever costs were involved. Ask Sean Marks how that worked out. Those Nets, like so many Sixers teams, were built on sand, were dreams. Randle was real. Randle begat Brunson. Brunson begat the rest. Real recognizes real.
The Knicks won last night because they knew Brunson was a real, 3-dimensional, flesh-and-blood answer to the questions they were asking when they signed him; he went off for 33 points, showing the Sixers still have no answer for him. The next big addition to this team was Josh Hart, who is only making a case as perhaps the Association’s first-ever utility man All-Star while putting up numbers only Embiid, Nikola Jokić and Larry Bird ever have. He wasn’t some All-NBA tectonic force when they acquired him. But the Knicks were building something greater than the sum of its parts. Hart may have been no more than a nickel or a dime in Portland, but here he’s a shiny silver dollar. Another triple-double last night had Maxey singing his praises and has some indie All-Star buzz building around Mr. Mike & Ike’s.
Precious Achiuwa was considered a throw-in by many in the OG Anunoby trade. Instead, he’s given the Knicks something they’ve lacked for years: a bench big capable of contributing meaningfully for more than a year at a time. Noel was a terrific Knick in 2023. Taj Gibson played a big role then, as well. Isaiah Hartenstein struggled a lot his first few months here, then was solid-to-spectacular his last year and change. Achiuwa isn’t the rim protector Noel is, nor the kitchen-sink sort iHart was. But last night the Knicks lose if not for him. It’s that simple. That’s something you could have said about a half-dozen times since Mr. Throw-In arrived last year.
The Knicks, to the point that they’re criticized for it (by me, at times, admittedly), always try to win. They wanna win the quarter, win the half, win the game; if the game’s already been decided with 10 minutes left, they wanna win those last 10 minutes too. I recently read somewhere something I’ll paraphrase: “Your workplace culture isn’t found in signs or posters. It’s found in how your workers feel when they go to bed Sunday night.” No matter who is suiting up for the Knicks or who isn’t, who’s starting, who’s a sub, no matter the situation or the meaningfulness of that night’s game, the Knicks go to bed the night before excited to play and expecting to win. That is why they succeed. The Sixers? Apparently all they need is a dollar, a dream, and a decade-plus. Good luck with that.
Quoth DeuceJuice: “Nice OT. The nicest.” Next game is tomorrow’s return of Randle and the Big Ragu. I feel like however it goes, “nicest” won’t be how we describe it.
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In unrelated but far more important news, I’m sharing a link to a Gofundme for my former fiancee, the mother of my kid. She was recently the victim of an unimaginable medical nightmare, one that completely changes the course and look of the rest of her life as well as my kid’s. I’ll share the link for anyone interested in contributing. I’m not going to go into details here because they’re awful. But if you can help someone in need, please click here.