Over at the GQ NBA Playoffs blog, David Roth put together an oral history of Zach Randolph. I was asked to contribute some thoughts about Z-Bo from his tenure with the Knicks. You can read the entire post here, and you should, because some fantastic writers chipped in with other perspectives about Zach.
David did his usual best, wrangling many verbose writers and distilling the submissions into a potent collaborative effort. For those so inclined, I am also passing along my raw submissions, two epistles on Zach which I sent in as the post came together. I have made them one essay.
On Zach Randolph and the Knicks:
Unavoidably, watching NBA basketball can feel like measuring height with funhouse mirrors. Winning and losing distort perceptions so severely that divining an accurate portrait of a player often requires the light of day only available on the other side of the ride.
Zach Randolph has looked tall in the playoffs this year. Following a regular season during which his characteristic production helped to lead a winning team, Randolph's stature has grown as the Grizzlies have beaten the Spurs and assumed, largely without intention, the persona of plucky upstart, a rare and cherished NBA archetype. The impact of such favorable lighting and illusory effects will only become greater if Memphis beats Oklahoma City in a series that already suggests we will miss it dearly once over. It turns out that thrusting your shoulders into a defender’s chest, leaning back from twenty feet, and flipping up shots that require special knowledge of physics can look great. Those mirrors can be slimming, even.
Not long ago, Randolph appeared much shorter, of course.
To make a splash during his first month as New York Knicks president, Isiah Thomas brought Stephon Marbury home from the desert. The Knicks acquired not only Stephon, a talented malcontent with a huge contract whose previous teams all had improved once he left, but also Anfernee Hardaway, a name that greatly exceeded its actual value. The price paid to Phoenix for this championship nucleus was steep, naturally: Antonio McDyess, Charlie Ward, Howard Eisley, two first round draft picks, and two Europeans.
The Stephon trade was archetypal Zeke--mortgage the future for a high-priced, overvalued present composed of retreads, questions, and strife. Marbury’s tenure in New York went according to that plan, and disastrous personnel decisions became a New York signature. Eddy Curry, Maurice Taylor, Steve Francis, Jerome James, Jalen Rose, Jamal Crawford, and Jared Jeffries followed. Never forget, New York. With the ever-approving reinforcement of basketball slumlord and rich man’s son James Dolan, Isiah’s inept basketball choices were matched by the depravity of the franchise’s culture, one that countenanced a slash-and-burn approach to everything and always assigned blame for the consequences to someone else.
Zach Randolph joined the Knicks during these dark days, and he symbolized another elaborate mistake that perpetuated the misery. Recall that the Knicks acquired Randolph on draft night in the summer of 2007. By then, Zach had punched teammates, toted guns, and been accused of intimidating witnesses and sexually assaulting strippers. Z-Bo’s regular-season Knick debut came that fall, a month after a jury had awarded Anucha Browne Sanders more than $11 million as compensation for Thomas’s sexual harassment and the Knicks’ organizational hostility. The previous year, the Knicks had fought the Nuggets en masse after Isiah had told the team to do so. Foolish, incompetent, gallingly expensive losers, the Knicks were loathsome. Acquiring Randolph for Francis, two players with outrageous contracts, reinforced the common wisdom that Thomas mistook activity for accomplishment while tilting toward a windmill no one else saw. New York had devolved into a pathetic farce steadily, and Randolph’s arrival was another episode in a historically indecent series.
With Z-Bo on the team, the Knicks started 1-9 and lost a November road game to the Celtics by 45. That same month, Stephon Marbury took a two-day leave of absence from the team after reportedly exchanging punches with Thomas on a team charter flight. Into this toxic culture, the Knicks had inserted a player known for his indifferent defense, high-volume shooting, and confounding personal life, one further marred (and also made hilarious) by skipping a 2007 Trail Blazer game so that he could spend time at a strip club while on bereavement leave. The Randolph Knicks would go on to lose 59 games in a wash out of embarrassment, injury, and ugly basketball.
Amid this haze of dysfunction and losing, Randolph was odious, a reluctant passer and defensive liability. Jump shots early in a possession were infuriating, and his floor-bound post game usually inspired curiosity, disdain, or both. Z-Bo’s disorienting defense was a fitting complement. He played little of it, and just as some of his offensive decisions were met by blank stares of disbelief, so could his defensive apathy and lapses inspire incredulity. He wasn’t the only offender, but as the most recent addition to the marquee, Randolph was an easy target at which Knick fans could direct their seething enmity for Isiah.
So unfortunate was his tenure in New York that Randolph’s physique, alone, summed up that bitter era. Randolph has never been a chiseled physical specimen. He does not have an average athlete’s muscle definition, and at times, he has been out of shape and overweight. While playing for the Knicks, Zach was a ready physical symbol of the team’s faulty culture and absent professionalism. Fair or not, it was convenient to regard Zach’s body with contempt, to see it as proof that the Knicks simply did not care. And playing alongside Eddy Curry, so dense and massive that “black hole” is not merely a pejorative basketball metaphor, did not help. A weak bloated front line suited the weak, bloated roster.
Things have changed in Memphis. Winning has made Randolph’s unique offensive style appealing due to its limitations. No longer some overpaid, stumpy jump shooter, Randolph is a post-game J.J. Barea, plucky and successful in spite of his physical limitations. With a coach and teammates who won’t accept only playing on one side of the floor, Randolph is a more willing defender who has found ways to use his size without relying on leaping or blocking shots. No longer a reflexively derided doughboy, Randolph’s body instead gives his salvation story a sense of youthful innocence, while also making his success even more captivating.
Knicks fans should look on with muted satisfaction. It’s the right thing to do. Randolph may have contributed to the Knick malaise that sunk the franchise for a decade, however he was neither its root cause nor its primary accelerant. As is often the case on a losing team, he was both a reason and a victim. Randolph deserves esteem for rehabilitating his image and career. He is perhaps the most persuasive argument for never abandoning hope: If Z-Bo can get it together like this, so might the Knicks one day. And everyone would be well served to remember Randolph as an object lesson about the way we watch the NBA.
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