NY Knicks: An Open Letter To All The Haters and Depreciators

To all the NY Knicks haters…kick rocks!

On the last day of February, in the year of our lord 2021, the SportsCenter Twitter account sent out this seemingly innocuous tweet about the Knicks. 

Totally harmless.

The tweet stated three facts that were true on that date and time. First, the Knicks were indeed 18-17. Second, the Knicks were absolutely in 4th place in the Eastern Conference. Third and finally, it unequivocally represented the Knicks’ best start since 2012-2013.

What I should have done after seeing the tweet was click the heart and move on about my day with the joy and knowledge that the preeminent cable sports show was talking about my favorite team in a positive way for the first time in a long time.

But, because I am the cat that curiosity killed, I decided to read some comments — surely I would just find a lot of love and congratulations from the rest of sports fandom, right?

That is obviously not what happened.

You would have thought SportsCenter tweeted out a WandaVision spoiler. So much misplaced vitriol.

The critiques of the Knicks fell into three primary categories: 1) The Knicks are garbage; 2) The Eastern Conference is trash; 3) This is nothing to celebrate.

Let’s take each of these pieces individually starting with the idea that the Knicks are garbage.

The NY Knicks have haters? Must mean they’re doing something right.

I have not encountered a single Knicks fan who believes this year’s team is winning a championship. Not one Knick loyalist is claiming that this squad is hanging anything legit in the rafters. Meme after meme says quite the opposite actually.

But garbage? Refuse? Rubbish?

It’s just flat-out untrue.

Per Basketball-Reference, the Knicks are 23rd in offensive rating. I won’t even dispute that a ranking that low is at least garbage adjacent. It’s the recycling bin at best. The team clearly still has work to do on the offensive end–a fact that every Knicks fan would own up to.

While they’re definitely struggling offensively, they’ve got guys like Julius Randle and RJ Barrett stepping up and leading the offense in ways we never thought they could, most notably, shooting the 3-ball at a high clip. It’s something any fanbase would be proud of.

Defensively is another world. The Knicks are third in Defensive Rating according to Basketball-Reference behind only the Utah Jazz and the defending NBA Champion, Los Angeles Lakers.

Garbage teams don’t keep that kind of company.

The Knicks finish in the middle in terms of Net Rating on Basketball-Reference. Unless we’re talking about the ABC sitcom, the middle ain’t garbage.

That brings me to the second general critique of SportsCenter’s tweet: The East is trash.

Hey, man. I get it. Calling the East trash is that song you always come back to. It’s a security blanket on a stormy night.

It’s also just no longer necessarily accurate in the same way. What one person calls weak, I call much more competitive. Yes, 18-17 had the Knicks in the 4th seed on February 28th. And, yes, that record would have them around 9th in the Western Conference.

What’s wild though is that only 10 games separate the first-place team in the East and the 14th. That game discrepancy is 15 games in the Western Conference, meaning there is a steeper cliff on that side of the bracket.

Maybe the teams at the top of the standings are tougher in the Western Conference, but there seem to be fewer “gimmie” games on the Eastern side of things. Go look at the teams in 13th and 14th place in the Eastern Conference (Wizards and Magic) and the teams in 13th and 14th place in the Western Conference (Kings and Rockets) and tell me which pair has the better shot to consistently upset higher-ranked teams.

This brings me to the third, and most dastardly of all the Knicks critiques in the comments of that tweet:  This is nothing to celebrate.

Nothing to celebrate? I would hate to see these people when a recovering addict gets their first sobriety chip.

Nothing to celebrate? I would hate to be these people’s kids when they bring home a C after weeks of struggling in Math class.

Nothing to celebrate? The thing to celebrate was literally in the text of the tweet. This is the best start for the franchise since 2012-2013.

That is EIGHT YEARS! All those second-grade NBA heads haven’t seen a Knicks start this good in their lifetime.

If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.

It reminds me of that old saying that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.

I don’t know who actually said it, so I’ll just give the credit to my 11th Grade English teacher since that’s where I heard it first.

Because the fact of the matter is that, at their core, the people who posted that this year’s start is nothing to celebrate know the same thing the rest of us do.

The NBA is better off with a competitive Knicks team. And they’ve got one this season.