The Knicks and 76ers are about to end their functionally terrible seasons
The New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers are absolutely right where they should be, playing for absolutely nothing on Wednesday, the final night of the NBA’s regular season. The Sixers and Knicks did the right thing in essentially punting the final parts of 2016-17: New York ensures its top-six status in May’s NBA draft lottery with a loss on Wednesday, and Philadelphia could be two losses (Lakers and 76ers) and some lottery luck away from ending up with two top-five picks in this June’s draft.
[Follow Ball Don’t Lie on social media: Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Tumblr]
Outside of the Sixers’ enviable cadre of incoming first-round picks and New York’s ability to pair its incoming lottery pick with famed center/forward prospect Kristaps Porzingis, little should distance the 76ers and Knicks from other lottery teams working out of Phoenix and Orlando (and, we’re guessing, Albuquerque). These Knicks and Sixers couldn’t settle for equal footing among the typical lottery regulars, though. Not with so much coverage to beg for, and so many sins of the past to run from.
The Sixers looked like a playoff team for brief stretches in 2016-17 when fully healthy, but half the franchise’s future seems to rest on a project player in Joel Embiid who has worked a total of 786 minutes and has yet to prove his legs can handle working a gig like professional basketball, deadening but true. The other half sits in the unused locker of would-be 2016-17 rookie in Ben Simmons, a still-growing prospect who won’t play his first NBA game until 16 months after his drafting date, a 76ers tradition at this point.
The Knicks, meanwhile, are surviving on Jeff Hornacek and sometimes Phil Jackson taking the heat for owner James Dolan, who is (mostly) hiding from having to take the heat for his decision to employ Jackson and sign off on hiring Hornacek as coach. Unlike the 76ers, these Knicks never looked like a playoff team in 2016-17, and yet the group was constructed with playoff hopes that many at least acknowledged but few if any respected heading into the season.
In absence of the high piety he’s usually allowed to exude while either making excuses for or being enabled by a series of highly successful superstar players, Jackson has now bowed down for his second tanking season in three full campaigns as Knicks president. To the outsider, it appears he’s just rationalizing at this point, finding what he sees as subversive wins between his own lines while he cashes those checks, and it’s hard to blame the guy.
The Sixers are getting by almost entirely on the work of former general manager Sam Hinkie, the man who brought in the current two leading candidates in the worst Rookie of the Year race in league history. New general manager Bryan Colangelo, as a first-year GM in this city, presently has little intrigue or obvious big-picture play to offer his patient fans, while failing in his public relations task to establish himself as the sort of guy who would never tank an NBA season, let alone two.
Both Colangelo and Jackson are now those sorts of guys, and for good reasons. You can build a significant and lasting winner through the NBA draft lottery, if luck and smart team construction (but mostly luck) are in strong supply.
Neither NBA powerhouse, for all of the many plaudits earned by both men in their previous spots, has proven suited for the task of creating a winner moving forward. Too much has changed in a decade, since Colangelo was charged with saving the Toronto Raptors, and since Jackson oversaw the good fortune of being handed Pau Gasol to work with alongside Kobe Bryant while coaching the Lakers.
Well-worn by the talk, what’s left of the 76ers couldn’t help but address what, for a second, felt like a small movement.
“A lot of us talk about it all the time,” T.J. McConnell said. “Not only Joel, but Ben [Simmons]. If we had everyone that was supposed to play, I don’t think the game on Wednesday [against the New York Knicks] would be our last game of the year.”
But McConnell went to say that Embiid was and still is the team’s focal point. He’s the reason there’s a belief that the Sixers will make a strong playoff push next season.
“If you can tell me there’s [another] guy that’s scoring 20-plus points a game in 25 minutes, I’d like to know who it is,” McConnell said.
There isn’t one. There’s never been one. That blinking red light just toward the side of the front-of-house sound booth, though, keeps blinking.
It keeps telling us that while we’ve never really seen anything just like Embiid before — snippets of some glorious Hakeem vs. Ewing amalgam dotting a career mostly filled with foot and knee setbacks, costing him 215 out of 246 scheduled games in three seasons — we may never see anything like Embiid again.
He’s too injured to play on Wednesday night, as has been the case for most of the last three years. Joel may never be healthy enough to pull a season like this — even merely a return to 2016-17 standards, in only 30-odd games — off again. And that’s a shame because, for the team that went 13-18 with its stud center playing but those 25 minutes a night, they kinda need the guy moving forward:
“He does everything, really,” McConnell said. “He commands double teams, which gets us open shots. He’s a threat in every aspect of the game. There aren’t many like him.”
The Sixers went through hell to get Joel Embiid. It cost the team its nerve and its GM his job. And though remaining parts of the lengthy wait still have their charms — Michael Carter-Williams was, in Hinkie’s final days, turned into a pick that could rank in the top three in this year’s draft, and Dario Saric has been fun — the mealy chatter surrounding Embiid and Simmons’ ongoing injuries, mixed with the iffy return for Nerlens Noel, should have Sixers fans somewhat worried as the franchise tries to have it both ways.
Even given the benefit of the best possible odds when it comes to Simmons and especially Embiid’s viability as productive, healthy players moving forward.
Sorry.
At least Sixers fans haven’t gone through what Knicks fans have worked through since, well, pick a date. The choices typically begin in 2001, when Dolan took over the boner-to-blunder operations of the Knicks in earnest, but dozens of impactful dates from the quarter-century prior to Dolan’s chauffeured stumble to third base would suffice.
On paper, the Knicks haven’t had nearly the amount of injury woe as the 76ers, ranking 20th in a league of 30 teams in the amount of NBA man games lost by the, um, ManGamesLost.com website. (Philadelphia earned top honors.) What they did do, though, is start the season banking on Joakim Noah, Derrick Rose and Carmelo Anthony to lead the team to a postseason return. That’s turned out terrible, for various reasons.
While Anthony has only mostly sat due to rest this year, Rose and Noah both saw their seasons end early following necessary knee surgery. Noah, insult to injury and then back to injury, even piled on a season-ending suspension suspension prior to giving the Knicks his second season-ending surgery of the year.
Hornacek says it’s a wonder Melo even made it to spring:
“He played more games than I anticipated,” Hornacek said. “Knowing he was getting older with his knee, until we were out of the playoffs [race], he missed one game maybe. He did a lot of good things. Obviously he can score the ball and put it in the hole, a guy along with Derrick [Rose] you can go to late. They came through sometimes.”
Sometimes?
“It was what we expected,’’ Hornacek said of Anthony’s season.
Was it?
Wednesday could prove to be Anthony’s last game with the Knicks. It’s unlikely, it’s not “expected,” but there is still a chance that Anthony could waive his no-trade clause and accept a deal to a contender for the final two seasons of his contract.
Anthony is more than aware of that. He’s already made reference to his upcoming discussion with Jackson, without revealing what it would need to force him away (as many Knick fans, and Jackson, would like) from New York and to another team in a trade, so as to give the Knicks anything to show for the future Hall of Famer’s time in New York (outside of a lone second-round appearance).
Hornacek, in anticipation of that meeting and in the hours before New York’s final game of the season on Wednesday, gave an evasive, needless “update” on Monday, utilizing the sort of boiler plate form — airtight in its case for absolutely nothing — that tends to infect just about anyone that comes into contact with James Dolan’s Madison Square Garden:
“I’m sure a lot of things will be discussed,” Hornacek said. “That’s something I can’t predict what’s going to happen in that meeting, or what we talk about. Obviously we’ll talk about the season, going forward, what’s going to happen. It’ll be about that.”
Hornacek went on to say that his first year with Anthony was “good at times,” which is as apt a description as one could come up with at this time of year. He’s not incorrect; even the cruelest of winters probably provide a snowball fight or two.
That was the year that was, for the Knicks and 76ers. We’re 81 games in, in yet another season full of contests that mostly did not count, and still nobody should be sure what to make of these outfits.
– – – – – – –
Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
