Lessons in Fanhood from the Knicks

When I try to describe my love of sports, especially basketball, to people who don’t share it, I tend to emphasize its similarities to the higher arts. As with dance or music or theatre, it is impossible to truly appreciate hoops without reference to style and beauty, the indelible marks of individual creative expression. It makes all the sense in the world: it’s hard to think of Brunson’s thoughtful footwork, a flippant pivot here, a probing jab-step there, without also thinking of a dancer like Savion Glover, beating coded messages into the floor with every tap of his shoes. Hart runs from one corner of the floor to the opposite, leading the fast break with an odd, diagonal energy, and it’s not unlike an especially ingenious bit of stage blocking by a theatre director—the kind of movement that, in its unpredictable simplicity, charges the stage with new meaning, new possibilities. Bridges, erratic but electric like Chaka Khan, pulls off one of his unreasonable fallback shots, his legs scissoring like a swimmer’s, and the Garden crowd howls: spontaneous call-and-response, as happens when a good band in a live setting breaks down its best tune and enjoins you to take a part and sing.

Choosing to discuss the appeal of sports in these terms has many advantages, the greatest of which, to me, is that it helps avoid the tired clichés about physical competition as a thinly veiled expression of nationalism or tribal instinct, some Hobbesian substitute for the constant state of war. But I’ll admit, keeping up with the Knicks, especially recently, brings up some of these supposedly baser sentiments. These past few Brunson-blessed years have reintroduced me to the more rabid aspects of watching basketball, an activity that has always offered me an ocean of solace.

I admit it: I do feel a kind of nativist, automatic kinship with whoever’s wearing the blue and orange, something to do with my everlasting allegiance to the city-state of New York. I try (and, just ask around, often fail) in life to restrain my judgments and act fairly and think before I speak; when the Knicks are on, playing prettily or not, I am a foulmouthed partisan, pumping my fist and pacing the living room, issuing imprecations at the team’s opponents (in the privacy of my home, I speak about the Philadelphia 76ers’ center Joel Embiid in ways that should embarrass me, but don’t), or at whichever Knick is playing poorly and souring my mood. My connoisseurship plays second fiddle to my status as a member of the clan.

So it went all season—a year that taught me anew how odd it really is to be a fan. The Knicks started off strangely, winning games at a good clip but looking downright horrible—and, to boot, interpersonally unhappy—whenever they lost. After last season’s queasy journey, which came to a sorry end in the Eastern Conference Finals, against the Indiana Pacers, Rose decided that, to make the next leap in the team’s progress, he’d have to fire the team’s coach, Tom Thibodeau. It was the right call: Thibs, as he is called, is a lovable grump and an enjoyable sideline presence who had a knack for wringing great, gritty performances out of his team of questing try-hards. But he was inflexible about lineups and tactical choices, and tended to play his core guys into the ground.

The new hire was Mike Brown, a funny, amiable man, who, at least outwardly, looks to have a converse personality to Thibodeau. He makes the journos laugh when he sits for press conferences and never appears too pissed off about the direction of the team. He showed up in New York with a bag of new concepts for the offense—mostly aimed at making the ball move a bit more, and coaxing the Knicks away from depending so heavily on solo heroics from Brunson and Towns. But perhaps they didn’t go down so smoothly. Towns, a seemingly very nice guy who can’t help but betray his emotional fluctuations, sometimes showed up to his post-game pressers in a foul mood, speaking cryptically about his discomfort within the new scheme. Asked about his place in the offense early on, he said, “Honestly, I don’t know . . . but we’re figuring it out.”