Exits: Flesh wounds

Writer Abe Beame on these gruelling, improbable Knicks, and their exhausting capacity to inspire hope.

In the stoned, goofball Dad-joke classic, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the king of a doomed utopia comes to a clearing in the woods and approaches a bridge he has to cross on his quest to find the chalice Jesus drank from at his final seder. The bridge is guarded by a dark knight. The knight is imposing, looming silently, dressed all in black with a helmet covering his face that looks like a cast iron furnace. King Arthur first tries to enlist him to his cause, but the knight is a stubborn, myopic dick, single-minded and dedicated to his simple, stupid task: guarding the bridge. 

The knight is out-manned by the mythical king and his squire, but he draws anyways, and they start fighting. The knight wields his sword enthusiastically but clumsily. He’s all heart, and it’s immediately apparent there’s a discrepancy, a skill issue. He’s outclassed by the king, who easily ducks or meets and parries his awkward lunges. King Arthur quickly cuts off his favored arm, theoretically ending the fight. But the knight won’t yield. He won’t acknowledge his arm has been severed from his shoulder, and keeps coming for Arthur, who is incredulous, and has little choice but to cut off the knight’s other arm. Arthur kneels to pray, thanking God for his victory, and gets kicked in the head by the knight who still refuses to surrender. Now annoyed, Arthur cuts off one leg, then the other. Without arms or legs, the stump of man still wants to fight, and as Arthur crosses the bridge, the knight calls out for more, for Arthur to come back and face him, so he can bite him.

Let’s talk about Josh Hart, the most accurately named basketball player in the history of the sport.

Until the end of the Knicks-Pacers series, Hart led the NBA playoffs in minutes played. During the last two rounds of the playoffs, Hart played center, he brought up the ball, he hit corner 3s, he crashed boards, he regularly turned in stat lines that looked like extended fibonacci sequences, he guarded Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, and Tyrese Halliburton at the same time, he landed a commuter flight that lost an engine shortly after takeoff in the East River, he bagged Sabrina Carpenter and she’s being weird and clingy and super texty about it. He is the human embodiment of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, elated to be left as a cut down and hollowed out seat for his beloved boy.

I watched him in Game 6 against the Pacers, in a loss that was never really competitive, nursing an “abdominal strain”, or holding his entrails in his stomach with both of his hands. He came back in the game. He played 37 minutes in Game 7. Hart gave and gave and gave until there was simply nothing left to give.

What is left to say about Jalen Brunson that hasn’t already been said about Lou Gehrig, or Neil Armstrong, or Muhammad Ali, or 9-11 first responders, or Lady Gaga, or Spider-Man? The player who had the second most minutes in the playoffs this year, until the Knicks were eliminated, was Brunson.

The sentence of this season was “Jalen Brunson is a star”, and these playoffs served as the punctuation. He left behind all Earthly conception for what we believed he- or any small guard exclusively practicing an odd, electrifying brand of hesi-based ground and pound offense- was capable of achieving. He got the reality show Shark Tank canceled because of how seriously he damaged the public perception of Mark Cuban’s business acumen. The situational comedy is largely dead as a viable American article of pop culture, but the best one on television this year was about three college buddies who move to the big city and find unlikely success as a trio playing for the Knicks.

We will never know what would have happened if, up nearly twenty towards the end of the fourth quarter of a meaningless game in late January, Julius Randle had been on the bench, rather than careening into Jaime Jaquez, dislocating his shoulder and ending his season, but I think it was for the best. It allowed Brunson to ascend, to seize this team, this city and his destiny. He unlocked this motley bunch and earned the second seed in the East over far more talented challengers because we wanted every second of play more than they did. Randle going down established a trend, but also an ethos, it turned “Next Man Up” from a cliche into biblical scripture. Randle dislocated a shoulder, Mitchell Robinson fractured his ankle, Bojan Bogdanovic hurt his wrist, then fucked up his left foot; OG Anunoby strained a hamstring, Hart strained an ab, Brunson fractured his left hand. So on comes Donte Divencenzo, Miles McBride, Isaiah Hartenstein, Precious Achiuwa, Alec Burks. We thought we understood these players. We thought they were known quantities with a fixed ceiling. We were wrong. All were called in an impossible succession. All served. And for now, their watch is done.  

These Knicks were an extension of their coach, executing his trademark blend of aggressive, relentless, deeply persnickety defense and effective if unimaginative offense with a glut of second chances woven into the design. They were a college team. They were the early 2010s Chicago Bulls, which before this playoff run I would’ve taken as an insult, now I’m not so sure. Because of the mysterious and unpredictable nature of injuries, of exactly how and why they occur, the eternal Tom Thibodeau debate is an exhausting, divisive issue that is as obnoxious to hash out online or in bars as politics. Both sides are completely intractable, emphatic, and wrong.

Down the stretch of this season, as the starter minutes ballooned and Thibodeau refused to use the bench Leon Rose had meticulously composed for him- without any young legs or athletic seat fillers who refuse to yield to his dogma, skeptical of this coach who sides with the French generals against Colonel Dax in Paths of Glory and believes his platoon could’ve taken the Anthill from the Germans if they “wanted it bad enough”- I feared, and actually wrote a piece laying out a worst case scenario for how this season could end for the Knicks. I imagined a squad reduced to a MASH unit of wounded soldiers, Thibodeau barely able to field a professional basketball team. I posited any team Tom Thibodeau is allowed to coach in the way he sees fit is destined to end up on the losing end of pyrrhic victories in the first or second rounds, gritty, admirable losers with a cap on what they can possibly achieve. When the piece was done, it was fine. But I asked my (generous and patient) editor to do me a solid and kill the piece before we ran it, because it was a bummer, because I didn’t want to be right. And I was right about what eventually happened, but I wasn’t about how it would feel, or what it all potentially means. 

This team delivered weeks, months of sustained giddy joy, as win followed impossible win. To watch men sacrifice themselves in this psychotic manner, to come together and sweat and bleed and give themselves over to something larger than a final score is compelling. It is moving. In Game 2 of the first round against a team that arguably had the two best players in the series, the Knicks won the type of game they haven’t won in 25 years, as we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory over and over and over again. I had forgotten what it feels like to hit the big shot(s), to be pleasantly surprised by something that can happen on a court. 

Suddenly, the future was limitless and bordered on the surreal. And the skeptic was convinced. I had a breakthrough, not breakdown, breakthrough. I changed my mind, or had my opinion pummeled into submission by the grueling, relentless, indomitable human spirit. Is this Knicks season really over? Who can say. Maybe the body truly has no limits and we are all living in Tom Thibodeau’s lucid dream. And we’ll never get injured and we’ll never get sick and we’ll never get old and we’ll never die and we can all stay in the first two rounds of 2024 NBA Eastern Conference playoffs together forever.

The secret of New York City sports is we’re a town led by Patrick Ewings and Derek Jeters that reserves its secret heart, its true love for our Orlando Hernandezes and Anthony Masons. In this Knicks squad, we at last got the team we deserve, that we’ve always wanted, as we suffered through two and a half decades of over the hill names, overpaid saviors who didn’t deliver, ball hogs and primadonnas who wouldn’t play the 4. This was a team built outside the lottery, almost all discarded and counted out on their second, third, fourth teams. They played in the middle of Manhattan but defined the outer borough spirit and attitude that makes this place special.

At the end of Game 7, with three minutes to play and the team down double digits, Josh Hart fouled out. They were his final seconds of the season. He was a stubborn, abrasive, gaping asshole till the bitter end, wholly unreasonable and unrealistic in the face of defeat. A 10, 8 and 5 never made me cry before, but that night, it did. As he walked off the court, he looked back at the screaming Garden crowd, at the field where he had done battle and left everything, and stopped for a moment. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he ran to the nearest Pacer, and bit him.