Don't Fear The Rebuild (Or the Short-Sighted Fan Returns With A Vengeance)

In professional sports, there is a concept known as the rebuild, whereby a formerly successful franchise recognizes that its best days are behind it and starts doing what it can to pawn off what’s left and start again.

For the Knicks, the turning point was probably around 2000 after their improbable run to the finals. Ewing was running on fumes and the team was stocked with older veterans in their prime, who weren’t getting any better. But the conventional wisdom was that you can’t rebuild in New York. The fans won’t have it. The pressure to win is too high. This perceived intolerance to the rebuild led to a lost decade of Knicks basketball during which the Knicks have averaged 27 wins.

Ewing turned into Glen Rice and Luc Longley. Glen Rice turned into Howard Eisley and Shandon Anderson. Howard Eisley turned into Stephon Marbury and Anfernee Hardaway. Anfernee Hardaway turned into Steve Francis (and cost the Knicks Trevor Ariza). Steve Francis turned into Zach Randolph (and cost the Knicks Channing Frye) and Zach Randolph turned into Cuttino Mobley. Latrell Sprewell turned into Keith Van Horn who turned into Tim Thomas who turned into Eddy Curry. Othella Harrington and Dikembe Mutombo became Jamal Crawford. And then there was the Jared Jeffries signing. And the Jerome James signing.

Really, what Ewing and then Rice and then Eisley and then Anderson and then Hardaway and then Francis should have turned into was cap space.

What Sprewell and then Van Horn and then Tim Thomas should have turned into was cap space.

What Harrington and Mutombo should have turned into was cap space.

Jeffries and Jerome James should have never been signed, and in their place should have been cap space.

Eight years after the Knicks charted their miserable course by trading Ewing instead of letting him expire, the Knicks hired Donnie Walsh to stop the madness and lead the team in a more sensible direction, one that people said could not be explored in New York, one of rebuilding. And now Ewing’s ghost is finally being exorcised from the Garden floor by Donnie Walsh and Mike D’Antoni, who banished Ewing’s ultimate lineage, Stephon Marbury, and allowed him to turn into cap space. Ewing’s ghost will depart with finality after the 2010 NBA Draft, when the remnants of a generation of a fear of rebuilding are extinguished by the Utah Jazz who will make a selection that should belong to the Knicks.

In the meantime, Donnie Walsh will try to continue what he started when he took over as Knicks’ President: turn players into cap space. And then rebuild.

And he is going to hear the vitriol of many short-sighted fans, who complained about the Knicks’ poor cap management as they stumbled from season to season this decade, trading away draft picks and cap flexibility in an effort to squeeze into the playoffs as an eighth seed. Now those same fans are complaining about the rebuild, and the difficult medicine they need to take if they want to see their team return to prominence. They want Mike D’Antoni fired, because he is struggling to squeeze wins out of a team of untalented, disinterested, over the hill, selfish, or overrated veterans who have a singular agenda of getting their numbers to secure their next contract.

These fans ignore that it is the players who play the game. Who are payed to play the game. Who are the only ones capable of having pride in themselves. The coach can’t do that for them. Charles Oakley said, “I’m going to put this on the players because it’s up to them to fight every night. The coach can’t fight for you.” But some fans want the coach gone. They imagine that Avery Johnson or Byron Scott or Mark Jackson will carry this team to the playoffs. Maybe that holy grail of an eighth seed that the Knicks had been chasing for the better part of the last 9 years.

They ignore that Doc Rivers’ Celtics won 24 games, with Paul Peirce, in 2006-2007. Doc Rivers’ Celtics won 66 games and an NBA finals the next year. What changed? Hint: It wasn’t the coach, though a coaching change would have made the rabid Celtics fans who were clamoring for Rivers’ head happy, I’m sure. They’re happier now.

But what the short-sighted fans really ignore is the reason Mike D’Antoni was hired in the first place. Even before the 2006 Olympics, when he ingratiated himself with the games’ biggest stars, D’Antoni was widely respected and loved by his players, many of whom owed their career to D’Antoni by way of salvation (Boris Diaw, Eddie House), improvement (Steve Nash), some combination of the two (Joe Johnson, Raja Bell), or simply making them look more effective then they were (Shawn Marion, Amare Stoudemire, Quentin Richardson, Tim Thomas). Donnie Walsh knew this and he jumped at the chance to put one of the important pieces to the rebuild firmly in place, giving D’Antoni $6 million per to coach a team that was sure to be uncompetitive for a couple of years. After this year though, D’Antoni will be a major draw in Walsh’s gambit to return the Knicks to a summit they have not visited since the 1990s. After the gambit plays out, the real judgment can commence.

In the meantime, while the Knicks endure their widely anticipated struggles, some fans will still chant “Fire D’Antoni”, just as they chanted “Fire Layden”, and “Fire Isiah”. The latter two were deservedly fired because they employed a failed strategy of a perpetuation of mediocrity, literally, at all costs. As long as Donnie Walsh is in charge though, D’Antoni won’t be fired, because the strategy is different, and the short-sighted fans who STILL don’t understand that you can’t always win “NOW!“, are finally being forced to take their medicine.

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