No One Owns the Light

Rooting for the Knicks has been a bleak experience for more than a decade. That sadness has been well-chronicled here, there, and at almost all points in between. New York's story is a farce these days, with each episode either placing the team farther astray, or, while attempting a repair, unwittingly illustrating just how broken the Brickers have become.

The latest chapter in the absurdly depressing story came last Thursday, when news broke that the Wizards would accept Kirk Hinrich's contract and allow Chicago to sign two of this summer's most-coveted free agents. All thoughts immediately focused on LeBron and his self-designated shieldmaiden of Rohan handmaiden, Chris Bosh. That duo suddenly seemed exceedingly likely to join a strong extant roster on the Bulls. I suffered a temporary psychotic break as the sickening reality washed over me and left me numb and drooling. Over the weekend, the emerging suspicion that Bron and Bosh would join Derrick Rose seemed to bloom in full, as The New York Times reported and ESPN echoed.

In college football, high-school recruits on the verge of committing routinely go to bed Wolverines and wake up Seminoles. Or Buckeyes before Tigers. The NBA landscape may not yet have come into so sharp a focus that the expected free-agency upheaval of 2010 can be treated as a fait accompli, but some important landmarks appear to have emerged on the horizon. If LeBron does leave Cleveland and spurn New York for better-lacquered hardwood elsewhere (that's like a greener pasture, right?), Knicks fans will be allowed some frustration, some anger, and some despair.



For two years, the entire franchise has pointed toward this summer as the time of reckoning. Once Isiah Thomas was fired, the Knicks told New Yorkers to put their faith in Donnie Walsh's free-agency-fueled rebuilding plan. No tampering was required for anyone with a pulse to understand that the team in the country's biggest media market, the team housed in the World's Most Famous Arena, was going to furiously attempt to lure the league's brightest star. Two years of cautious optimism, of knowing patience, of hope for real change will be frustrated when Chicago unveils its newest #6. There will be an emotional bloodletting.

Knicks fans must maintain some perspective, though. First, no fans will be entitled to the scorn and anguish which Cleveland's will experience. Knicks fans have arrived at this party hoping to hook up with Amanda Beckett; Cavs fans are losing everything as she divorces them. Second, the basketball product which New York can offer has long been underwhelming. To expect an already rich global icon to substitute winning for incremental increases in fame and wealth was a fantasy, if not straight up hubris. The real appeal of New York was, and will remain, the narrative it has to offer: come to basketball's spiritual center and create mythology, not just championships. That story is an asset, but its value may not be sufficiently high. Third, investing too much in the heartache of missing out on LeBron neglects the truly excruciating truth in which Knicks fans are about to marinate for a long, long time:

Toxic recent history is about to be repeated.



More distressing than the growing whispers that LeBron and Chris Bosh will sign with Chicago is the supposed tonic that the Knicks are prepared to offer maximum contracts to Joe Johnson and Amare Stoudemire. Here's the plan:

While the Hawks hope to keep Johnson in Atlanta, several sources said the Knicks have emerged as his first choice. If they must lose him, the Hawks' preference is to work out a sign-and-trade deal with the Knicks.

But if no players on the Knicks' roster appeal to Atlanta, Johnson, believing he will make up the difference through endorsements and through buying stock shares in Madison Square Garden, is willing to take less money to play with the Knicks, according to sources.

Whatever the case, the Knicks could offer Johnson a maximum-salary contract worth approximately $96 million over five years, or a deal worth $125 million over six years through a sign-and-trade.

Walsh and D'Antoni also hope to meet with Amare Stoudemire while in Los Angeles.

Johnson and Stoudemire emerged as star players while playing for D'Antoni in Phoenix, which is a large part of the reason both players are considering New York so strongly.

Johnson averaged double figures (16.7 ppg) for the first time in his career while playing for D'Antoni in the 2003-04 season. That same year, Stoudemire went from being a 13-point scorer to a 20-point scorer in D'Antoni's wide-open system.

While the Knicks' main target is James, the duo of Johnson and Stoudemire would be a nice consolation prize if James goes elsewhere. The team thinks James and Johnson would be a particularly strong tandem, and it believes that Johnson will talk to James about the benefits of joining forces in New York.

Be afraid. Be angry, and terrified, and hostile, and inconsolable. Despair, and then get really pissed off. Channel your worst feelings of powerlessness, the sort which you might experience while reading this, and amplify them by an order of magnitude approaching infinity. Maxing out with Johnson and Stoudemire is a plan for losers, and the Knicks appear to have spliced this sort of foolhardy, empty decision making into the organization's DNA. The Brickers are institutionally incompetent, and that is a crushing development.

For those like James Dolan, Donnie Walsh, and Mike D'Antoni who appear to possess no short-term memory or, alternately, cling to a froward insistence on ignoring reality, let's recall that this past spring, Joe Johnson was awful. He played listless, ineffective basketball as Atlanta embarrassed itself so thoroughly that the team fired the coach and all but acknowledged that these Hawks, led by Johnson, are not hardbody enough for a championship. Johnson has wonderful offensive skills, a collaborative demeanor, and a steady jumpshot, but he is not a cornerstone, the sort of transcendent player around whom a championship team is built. Nor is he an unproven player likely to mature into greatness. He turns 29 tomorrow, and he has already played ten NBA seasons. Unless the Knicks see him as their Paul Pierce and intend to acquire 2008's Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, Johnson is not raising banners.

Stoudemire, too, is not a maximum-money player. Sorry. For all of his obvious strengths, he remains an inadequate defender and a sometime enigma. His attitude vacillates, and with it, so does his effort. Until he was scared straight by George Bluth at the trading deadline this past season, Amare was incurring overages on his cellphone bill for having phoned it in so often. He has an ominous injury history, a factor of greater import when one considers that he will be leaving the care of Phoenix's miracle medical staff. The Suns restored Grant Hill's career, convinced the Cavs that Shaq could still play, and brought Amare back from microfracture surgery and an eye replacement (or whatever he had done up there). Shaq barely made it through 50 games this past season without them. One shudders to think of what might happen to this partially bionic man when New York's mediocre medical men inherit that lengthy treatment chart. Plus, if a dunker, finisher, and gazelle couldn't ever make it out of the Western Conference while being set up by Steve Nash, how is he going to realize his supposed potential when relying upon not-a-point-guard Joe Johnson and whomever else starts in that backcourt?

Similarly, let us not look past that even in Johnson, Stoudemire, and D'Antoni's supposed SSOL desert glory, they didn't win anything. Worse, they couldn't defend anything, an ugly hallmark of every D'Antoni team. How will any of that change on the Knicks...with Johnson and Stoudemire using most of the available cap space...and D'Antoni renewing his annually meaningless vow to improve?



Should the Knicks enter this summer intent to declare victory if the team can sign Johnson and Stoudemire, fill in the roster at the margins, sell a few more season tickets to unsuspecting rubes, and reestablish itself as good enough to make the playoffs and lose to the best teams, it will be devastating. This summer is the franchise's window of opportunity, and the Johnson-Stoudemire plan is tantamount to slamming that window closed before New York can get its fingers out of the way. For years, the Knicks have eschewed circumspect planning and patient rebuilding for splashy quick fixes. It has resulted in a decade of impossible salary-cap circumstances, a crippling culture of ineptitude, and zero appearances in even the second round of the playoffs. Even worse, it has encouraged an aching malaise and disillusionment among Knicks fans. For too long, every transaction has been met with a warranted feeling of dread. Hoping for a Knicks decision to work out well has been like hoping that the sun might not set that day.

New York's cultural sense of entitlement has bedeviled the team. New Yorkers are proud people who tend to assume that whatever they're doing or consuming is the best: theater, music, fashion, pizza, and so forth. In the athletic arena, that sentiment tends to demand winning (along with overpriced everything. You wouldn't pay so much if it weren't the best, after all. ) Accordingly, nothing has hurt the Knicks as much as the inescapable impression that New Yorkers will be easily mollified by even a false impression of respectability.

Knicks leaders of recent years--Checketts, Grunfeld, Layden, Thomas, Walsh, whomever--have imparted the perception that they toil under a burden of instant results. It's as though they each have internalized this city chockablock with demanding people living fast-paced lives, used to getting what they want when they want it, and responded by desperately flailing in pursuit of any theoretical solution, no matter how illusory. Giving an insane contract to Howard Eisley and acquiring Steve Francis are two notorious examples of this poisoned logic. Such faulty management decisions have betrayed a consistently patronizing attitude, quite frankly. Assuming that New Yorkers will accept any positive result and appreciate it as a superlative has gotten the Brickers in trouble. Management has operated without regard for whether fans see the equity in building toward something truly meaningful, not merely something attainable. Knicks management has ignored that Knicks fans might trust that the best process will yield the desired outcomes, and the franchise has devolved into a grotesque repository for everything awful about the City as a result. No one is satisfied by overpriced, hastily assembled, and foolishly flashy.



Never has one team more frequently mistaken activity for achievement. Season after season and era after era, New York has overhauled its roster by mortgaging the future in return for depreciated assets. Draft picks, emerging youth, and reasonable contracts have been swapped out for aging stars, injured has-beens, and expensive loss leaders. However, all of that churning seemed to always leave the Knicks further and further from championship stasis. The quest for one missing piece usually exposed a new need for two more. Eddy Curry, in all his rotund glory, has embodied this pathetic cycle every day that he has wasted away on New York's roster, and Curry's former team, the Bulls, will likely reap the benefit of New York's recklessness when it signs LeBron. The irony is suffocating.

Laying at least part of a foundation through the draft, common sense, and some luck has allowed the Spurs, Lakers, Celtics, Heat, and Pistons to collect every championship over the last ten years. During that same period, the Knicks have drafted nineteen players, and only two are even on the team. Sure, Kevin McHale's benevolence helped Boston, and yes, Los Angeles wouldn't have won in 2009 and 2010 had they not received the gift of Pau Gasol, but in both circumstances, the Celtics and Lakers were in a position to capitalize on the opportunities that arose. Teams, like people, can make their own luck. New York has not enjoyed that luxury, because it has done almost nothing smart. The Knicks even fired Marv Albert and replaced him with Mike Breen.



Despite all of the mismanagement, the putrid play, and the fan hysteria--we aren't even discussing truck parties--the summer of 2010 was going to be Jerusalem. In fitting New York fashion, the club would somehow get rich quick by slashing its way through a wilderness of roster detritus and arriving at the promised land on the other side.

The Knicks are now just a few steps away, and yet they appear to be moving backward. Johnson and Stoudemire surrounded by Danilo Gallinari, Toney Douglas, Wilson Chandler, and Eddy Curry will be more of the same. That's a nucleus that will have a hard time playing defense, will not count a natural playmaker among its members, and will be woefully shallow along the bench. If the recent playoff campaign taught us anything, it instructed that while great players are necessary ingredients in a championship mixture, so, too, is a strong supporting cast. Two great players may be necessary, but they, alone, are not sufficient. The Lakers only won this year because the team got the right contributions from Odom, Artest, Fisher, and Bynum in a timely manner. The Celtics, meanwhile, probably only lost because Kendrick Perkins was injured. Both teams needed nine reliable men, as did the Magic and the Suns. Adding Johnson and Stoudemire makes headlines for the Knicks, but it likely just extends the season by fourteen games at most. That shouldn't satisfy anyone.

Tempering the dire conclusions about impending idiocy, the Times reports that perhaps wisdom will win the day and beat back New York's institutional impetuousness. The Knicks may abandon the plan to sign two free agents to maximum contracts and instead opt for only one before targeting second- and third-tier players. In this scenario, the Brickers would spread roughly twenty million dollars around two or three other players. The Knicks also would seek to unload Curry's expiring contract, which is big enough to exchange for a far better player who might have a deal too large for his failing and/or penurious team. Or, New York could pursue a Plan C and bank its cap room, move Curry, and remain under the salary cap for a little while longer.



For the Knicks, a team with so many holes, the alternate plans likely make more sense. Plan B would be a concession to necessity. Abandoning the faulty Xanadu of SSOL on Broadway, the Knicks could meet more needs. However, a more judicious mix of money and players might be a solution that is better than Johnson and Stoudemire by degree and not kind. If, as the Times notes, New York opts to focus on a larger swath of new acquisitions, the franchise is likely to welcome players such as Rudy Gay, Mike Miller, Raymond Felton, and J.J. Redick in some combination. Does a cocktail of Johnson, Gay, and, say, Tyson Chandler really scream out stadium status? Would you take that squad against LeBron, Bosh, Rose, et al.? Didn't think so. Especially not if New York signs someone else and watches Johnson, through a sign-and-trade deal for Luol Deng, join the Bulls. (Rose, Johnson, James, Noah, and Bosh could likely make a credible run at 73 wins.)

Plan C, then, is probably New York's best option, and also its best opportunity to break from the ugly and foreboding recent history. Assuming that neither LeBron nor Dwyane will sign with the Knicks, why not sign a player like Johnson, work tirelessly to swap Eddy Curry's expiring contract for Chris Paul, or "settle" for merely rejoining the ranks of sensible NBA teams? A worthwhile free agent this season coupled with dumping Curry's contract sets up the Knicks to be players in free agency in 2011 and beyond. The next free-agent class is not particularly promising, but the 2012 group will see another rash of young players on the market (including Kevin Durant), and they will have spent the previous two seasons developing their games under the careful, longing gaze of potential suitors.

Acting with restraint as a consolation this summer also carries two other consequences: regardless of any other transactions, proceeding slowly allows the younger Knicks to play meaningful minutes, and it ensures that the team is sufficiently bad enough to pick toward the top of the draft. (Pending, of course, the ever-present legacy contingencies that could cost New York its draft picks should the team be bad enough.) In two years, a younger core mixed with whomever joins the team along the way would perhaps compensate for existing deficiencies and isolate which shortcomings stood between New York and contending for a championship.

Put another way: regardless of the specifics, the Knicks need to finally swallow hard and accept operating like every other team. Absent a LeBron-Bosh combination, a long-overdue return to normalcy would be the best possible outcome from this summer. After years of taking one feverish step forward only to stand two steps further back, it's time for a new approach.

Or the Knicks could sign Johnson and Stoudemire. I will have killed myself at that point, so I really won't care anymore.

A Luncheon with DeMarcus

So, uh, yesterday I kind of spent an hour stalking DeMarcus Cousins around the Sean John store on Fifth Avenue. You can read about it on FD.

Music for a Monday: Once Again, Back, It's the...Legendary

Rappers get bodied by age all the time.

The single hardest thing to do in rap music is age gracefully. Think about the canon of rappers who have mattered.* LL Cool J tried for serial reinvention and failed. KRS-One tried to fervently push that true-school schtick and failed. Rakim and Dr. Dre have failed. (Don't front: that Detox single/leak thing is boring. As are most Dre beats of recent vintage. Sorry.) Snoop Dogg has aged, but it hasn't really been graceful. The Beastie Boys became Buddhist or something. EPMD got stale. Nas was crushed by the weight of Illmatic's legacy and has spent most of his career lost. Common serves up shit sandwiches on the reg when not working with Kanye. Tribe grew out of itself. N.W.A broke up. Ice Cube made three great albums and then went astray, ultimately winding up on TBS. Public Enemy is didactic and weird, some hermit-saint motherfuckers living in the wilderness for some time, now. 2Pac died young and still got awful as time marched forward. We could go on, but I don't think we need to belabor this truism.

* Take it easy with your protestations about "meaning," and who gets to decide what is and isn't important. This is a shorthand I am employing. If you want to write an essay about the timeless significance of Waka Flocka, enjoy yourself and then come back.

A quirky byproduct of this generally inescapable rule is that the few acts who do manage to age well--in whatever form they create for themselves, respectively--earn a special resonance and warmth for the mere survival, as though putting out music people like fifteen and twenty years after they first heard an artist had an intrinsic value. It's not dissimilar from the way golf announcers fawn over Fred Couples. Or the way some people (*cough* me *cough*) still lose their shit when they see De La Soul or Meth, Rae, and Ghost in concert. Remaining likable and even just competent for long enough is a skill our culture values.

With this in mind, bow down to the Roots for a moment. Am I an unapologetic Roots fanatic? Absolutely. Did I grow up as a music fan as they grew as a group, our relationship as rich and complicated as a marriage? Yes. Have I seen them damn near thirty times in concert? Yessir. But having offered that full disclosure, let me also assure you that the genuflection is warranted, because How I Got Over is truly powerful music.

To be fair, How I Got Over is a little underwhelming at first. After Game Theory and Rising Down, the Roots appeared to have charted a new course that was leading them back toward the more elemental boom-bap sound that carried Illadelph Halflife. Sure, recent Roots albums have been engaging forays into musical intricacy, but that detail never detracted from the simple, effective, blunt sound that invigorated tracks like "Here I Come," "Game Theory," "Rising Down," and "The Show," and even "Rising Up." How I Got Over instead opens with a somber and sparse soundscape, the jagged, tearing rapping of recent Roots albums replaced with dreary hooks that would make Drake ejaculate and verses whose edges have been sanded down. A Roots devotee is liable to swallow hard, sigh with disappointment, and approach the ensuing forty minutes with a mild contempt. However, the record rewards stronger faith.

After its lurching, discomfiting first three songs, How I Got Over emerges from the soupy, primordial opening sound as a deliberate, relaxed, and thoughtful record. Relying on the world-weary verses that Black Thought now pumps out with striking proficiency (Is he depressed a little? Trying out to be Lester Freeman one day?), and then supplementing them with a range of guest spots which sound less like cameos and more like temporary group reorganizations, the new Roots record is a mediation about the middle stages of life. For a group that has now been a consistent presence in rap music for the better part of two decades, and whose members are all middle aged, it's entirely appropriate. Given the Roots' gig as Jimmy Fallon's house band, the ensemble work with Blu, Phonte, Dice Raw, et al. feels like an organic extension of the way that this band now makes its music.

Accepting this growth, and appreciating the Roots on the terms they've chosen, allows the record's last half hour to serve as a soundtrack for reflection. Not a melancholy, rueful look backward, but instead the knowing glances inward that naturally arrive as jobs change, friends get married, and time marches along. How I Got Over is grown-man rap music for adults, and it's not embarrassed by that. I've quickly developed such an affinity for the album because it complements my life. This invites an obvious question: is the record universally appealing? On some level, it is. The smooth melodies that bathe the equally smooth vocals are not aggressive, or loud, or uncomfortable. At worst, a disinterested fan could easily throw it on and zone out or pay attention to something else.

But it also might be a record made by adults for adults. Hip-hop culture is oriented toward young people. The brash creativity that dominates the radio usually belies youthful audacity, if not blissful and redeeming naivite. Even when that originally earnest sentiment has been packaged by a record company. Part of what makes, say, Nicki Minaj a success is that she is new, she is forward, and she raps about stuff that titillates the audience and perpetuates a fantasy lifestyle. This works for a time and then wears off. Artists grow out of it (or they don't, Ludacris), and so do the fans. At that point, the artists usually lose their way, and the fans either gripe about that new new--Hey, I do that--or relax what they've perceived to be immutable standards as a means of accommodation--I do that too!

How I Got Over is different from all of that. It will never be on the radio. It has people singing with admonishment about getting their shit together; rapping about aging in a manner that goes beyond the superficiality of platitudes about finding the right woman to hold a man down. It sounds content to grapple with a set of issues and ideas that are decidedly removed from the young, street-level tropes of hip-hop's primary discussions. That is music which might appeal to all audiences on a technical level but will not mean anything particularly significant to a younger audience. So, the Roots may have succeeded in creating the first credible, interesting, non-cringe-inducing rap record for old people. What else would qualify? Kingdom Come? Blueprint 3? Jay-Z's nouveau-riche ruminations about selling out Summer Jam three or four times seem a little silly when juxtaposed.

This latest Roots record is probably what Phrenology should have been, only the sincerity and measured maturity of How I Got Over wouldn't exist without Phrenology. Nor The Tipping Point, another Roots effort which still, to this day, sounds self-conscious and different merely for the sake of breaking up the tedium. That phase of the Roots' music was a time of troubled growth, not dissimilar from an adolescent reinventing himself because he can, he's bored, and he needs to take some risks in order to learn. The Roots have learned much as they've transitioned from underground sensations to put-upon true-schoolers to ostentatious progressives and back to purveyors of that real shit. That education, more than anything, might be the message of How I Got Over. For all of its lamentations, its quiet considerations, and its more spirited I'm-not-yet-old-enough-to-stay-home-on-a-Saturday moments, the record hints at the dawn of something new, not merely the culmination of all things old.



And oh yeah--I'm back. Again. Like we always do about this time...