The New York Knicks Are Going To The NBA Finals

The duality and imminent reality afoot is this: I can’t look at anybody and tell them that I didn’t think this was going to happen. I did; I wrote as much in October. This is the team, and this is their time.

This is it: the New York Knicks are going to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999. On the other side of the table, now that we’re allowed to discuss the surreality we are all about to experience, remains a best-of-three series between increasingly battered squads, both of whom are playing some of the best basketball mere mortals have ever seen. 

Two series in a row, the Knicks have been nothing short of clinical. After not recording a sweep since that prior Finals run 27 years ago, they are now collecting brooms and have over a week to rest ahead of the next Game 1. Until recently, this has been an unfamiliar battle of rest versus rust versus keeping it together, and New York will be on watch after Game 1 of this series.

To my ears, to my eyes, to everything I know and think but, crucially, do not believe, this doesn’t make any sense. Orange Julius come and gone; #WhiteDonte; and, of course, the draft picks. Frank Ntilikina?? That’s only within the last five years.

During Game 1, we retreated from the big MSG watch party to a bar I’ve only ever been to ahead of Phish shows. We watched Jalen Brunson undo Jim Harden eleven times in a row; every stat that came out about the Knicks in Game 1 was more ridiculous than the next.

Landry Shamet has become the 2009 draft pick Donnie Walsh allegedly planned to make had it not broken otherwise, just in time. Josh Hart is putting up the prime Rondo statlines that end up meaning he was the game’s most valuable guy. Karl, exactly on time, has taken a hero’s turn.

Ex-scapegoat Mikal Bridges wants you, is begging you to ask him about those draft picks, how many points they averaged in these conference finals. Mitchell Robinson was on the roster the last time this team won 17 games. He’s still here, and so are we. OG Anunoby doesn’t need anyone’s attention, but he thanks you for your attendance, Tim.

For the second break in a row, it will be over a week until the New York Knicks play again. Whom does Jordan Clarkson favor at Roland Garros, I wonder, and will anyone unseat Jannik? Ah, better yet: John McEnroe is definitely thinking about the Knicks every time he mentions a shot he likes or doesn’t, and now, so will you.

All of what I had in the way of luck as an adult – Irish luck, a pejorative, but what little of it I’d accumulated to that point anyway – went toward getting Oasis back together, and Pep Guardiola (and Mario Balotelli) had much more to do with the latter than I’ll ever have to do with the Knicks being good, especially this good. 643-1.

A confession, given that St. Francis of Assisi on 31st wasn’t open prior to the Game 1 watch party outside of Madison Square Garden that I attended in order to pray over all of this: I have a difficult time being wrong, but I and you and everybody who has ever been within ten or so feet of me have an even worse time in me being right about anything. 

It is the easiest and most certain human experience to be wrong, or imprecise: a little slow; a little late. Everybody is, multiple times a day, about problems large and small, perceived and experienced and felt and all of the rest of it. The uncertainty is guaranteed to return; that’s the yeast puffing and distorting a rotten loaf, mostly. Accuracy, then, when you can find it ahead of time, is all the sweeter.

I cannot believe it, yet every skeptical and agnostic piece in me believes in this. The New York Knicks are in the NBA Finals. And the Knicks have one more hill to climb.