Playoff Office Hours: Old Knicks vs. new Lakers, be careful what you wish for & uh-oh, Sacramento
Waiting for the Knicks to return to action? Take the edge off with some Knick-adjacent content!
With slightly more than half of half the play-in games played, a look at one playoff, play-in and lottery-bound team, each with a Knicks connection.
Old Knicks vs. new Lakers
In one of the West’s many eyebrow-raising matchups, last year’s conference finalists Minnesota look to win playoff series in consecutive years for the first time in their history when they take on the Lakers, reborn since the Luka heist and who know a thing or two about making history. Which puts a couple of prominent former Knicks center stage.
Julius Randle could be a free agent this summer, if he wanted. All he’d have to do is decline a player option for a hair under $31 million next season. Like so many of God’s children, odds are he won’t, not when he’s 31 next year and the only good team with cap room this offseason doesn’t need him (Houston) while the others with money are all either losing teams who won’t be interested in him (San Antonio/Brooklyn) or places he won’t be interested in (Washington/Utah). If Randle shows out against L.A., he has the option of testing the market, which could appeal to someone who’s already lost one entire season to a broken leg and much of another to a separated shoulder. If he struggles, there are worse safety nets than that $31 million player option.
Then there’s Donte DiVincenzo, Miles McBride’s alliterative antecedent as the Association’s best contract most-exploited wage earner. Divo will make as much the next two years as Mikal Bridges does next year alone. The good news: DiVincenzo doesn’t have to start driving an Uber to get by and always plays like he makes max money. Knick fans loved him for that. They know what’s in his gas tank.
I don’t envy Randle having to check LeBron four to seven games, nor DDV getting trapped down on the block by Luka. But that’s the Timberwolves’ problem. I’m just glad there’s a series I can depend on to be my emotional escape valve from Knicks/Pistons.
You can’t always get what you want — and shouldn’t
With the firing of David Griffin, the New Orleans Pelicans have turned over everyone of consequence from the past six years. Except the person of most consequence, the one who’s why we mark six years ago as a border.
If you’re a Knick fan reading this, do you remember how you felt after they won an NBA-low 17 games to secure the best odds of winning the 2019 lottery, a two-star draft, only to fall to the third pick? Remember all those Zion dreams dashed? Even Zion looked devastated.
Alvin Gentry inherited the transcendent talent tracked to turn things around in the Big Easy. Some even dared hope Zion’s arrival could convince Anthony Davis to stay with the team that drafted him when he had no worker rights, that New Orleans was a bigger city than it is and a first-market franchise, when (according to the latest Zach Lowe show) even the team’s own players are open that it isn’t. Zion was gonna change everything. Easier said than done.
Gentry was canned after Williamson’s rookie year. Stan Van Gundy was in and out after a single season. David Griffin, head man for six seasons and a certified genius for having pinballs fall in his favor, inherited Anthony Davis and Jrue Holiday, landed Zion, traded for CJ McCollum and Dejounte Murray, drafted talented youngsters like Herb Jones and Trey Murphy III, signed jewels in the rough like Jose Alvarado and . . . never saw the Pelicans win a playoff series.
Now Griffin is gone, with Zion maybe next. It feels like he’s been in more trade rumors than big games. If the Knicks had won that long-ago lottery, would things have been different? I feel like no one can know.
I also feel like it’s not hard to imagine someone being less motivated to bust their ass for a third-rate franchise that lands them completely against their will, whose owners are known to have only bought the team as a sort of billionaire’s offhand “Oh, that’d be a shame” saving of a pro sports team in a city where said billionaire already owns another. The Beesons are like people who get a second pet because someone told them it makes the first pet happier when they’re not around, only they’re never around. And they never loved or wanted a second pet.
Worth remembering for a rainy day: for a few years, missing out on Zion and Ja Morant to end up with RJ Barrett gave a lotta Knick fans agita. RJ may have been a less gifted player, but he’s more known for basketball than his sex life and he never once demonstrated a baffling fixation with miming gunplay and other forms of violence. And eventually he helped the Knicks land OG Anunoby. Sometimes you gotta lose today to win tomorrow.
Know the ledge
And last, but not least, but maybe slipping back more in that direction than they have in a few years . . . the Sacramento Kings.
I come to bury the beam lighters, not to praise them. Honestly, they seem like they could use the break. It wasn’t too long ago the Kings’ renaissance mirrored the Knicks’. Now 2024-25 goes down as the year they:
traded their franchise player in De’Aaron Fox to get back Zach LaVine (under contract for next year, then can opt out) and San Antonio first-round picks during the (fingers crossed) likely heyday of Victor Wembanyama
fired Mike Brown, their most successful coach in 20 years, mere months after having to have their teeth pulled to extend him despite Fox, the franchise player they kept trying to sign to an extension, making it clear he wanted to playing for Brown
now may have to trade Damontas Sabonis, who’s talked about wanting to meet with owner Vivek Ranadivé this offseason
are, as I write this, down 23 at the half — at home — to the saddest team under the sun, the Dallas Mavericks, in the West’s 9/10 play-in game; if the Kings lose, their season is over and they may not have their first-round pick (you wanna make sense of all the possibilities, you’re welcome to try)
Whatever your feelings going in or coming out of these playoffs as far as the Knicks, they’re probably fair. Just remember: in a country where most of us are one financial thunderbolt away from disaster yet the creepocracy of the moment continues to criminalize suffering, you’re never far from being Sacramento. Two years ago they’d turned it all around. Today we’re reading about hopes that play-in success leads to “greater hotel occupancy.” Enjoy the playoffs, Knicks fans!
