In some ways, this part is hard to get out of your head. Think about how many times you and your best friend from college sat at an after-hours party and discussed how, in the years after graduation, you might save up some money and rent a house on the New Jersey coast or in the Hamptons for a week sometime in the future.
Has that ever happened to you? Did life get in the way? Life usually gets in the way.
So Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo and Mikal Bridges have got themselves a Shorehouse. It’s not quite the blueprint you might have had in mind at 4:30 a.m. Their future doesn’t include loud music, unlimited kegs of beer and midnight swims, but endless stretches of sweaty basketball practices and four-game, six-night road trips. But hey, everyone’s idea of paradise is different, right?
So in a sports world constantly bombarded with news about this player wanting to fire this coach, teammates not speaking up, player X being furious about the contract player Y just signed, etc., enjoy this. We’ve already seen how much Brunson, Hart and DiVincenzo enjoy playing together. It’s clear that Bridges wants to get back in the band, and all of the reactions so far have been genuine. This is rare.
And of course, if you wake up one morning next winter and the Knicks are 23-25, none of that will mean anything. That’s the reminder. That’s what forces you to fold up the feel-good part of this whole thing and put it in your pocket. Leon Rose didn’t make this trade to get more downloads of “Roommates.” He made this trade because he thought it would close the gap on the Celtics.
And the best part is, it happens.
And with OG Anunoby officially rejoining the team on a five-year, $212.5 million deal, the only caveat to all of this is the confidence that Julius Randle will recover from shoulder surgery and return to his normal form. And maybe this too. Given all the love from Villanova and all of Randle’s accomplishments with the Knicks, Anunoby is the Knicks’ highest-paid player (at least for now) at $36.6 million against next year’s cap.
How will Randle, who is also due for a new contract, react to this? And how will the Nova crew react, especially Brunson, who is due for a big pay raise down the road? We’d like to think that something as crude as money doesn’t infringe on the public interest, but that’s been disproved time and time again. But that doesn’t mean it will be the case here. Probably not.
If that doesn’t happen, and Anunoby stays on the court and Randle returns as fully engaged with the Knicks’ changed dynamic as he was in the two weeks prior to his injury, the Knicks will be a wing-heavy team that looks tailor-made to challenge the Celtics by forcing them to ask an easy question.
What will happen? Celtics What if they were trying to beat the Celtics?
It speaks to the confidence Rose has in Tom Thibodeau. Without a top-tier superstar on the team, no coach can deliver on championship-level ambitions. The Knicks are a team that thrives on team chemistry. It’s all about team chemistry. Thibodeau is the chief chemist.
And now the team he leads is clearly imitating the Celtics.
One of the top 10 players: Brunson/Jayson Tatum.
Another next level supporting star: Randle/Jaylen Brown.
Selfless two-way dynamo: Anunoby/Jrue Holiday.
And then there’s the right set of supporting players: Adding Bridges to DiVincenzo, Hart and Deuce McBride gives them a way to counter Derrick White, Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford, and more importantly, they have two defensive-minded wings in Anunoby and Bridges to try to neutralize Tatum and Brown.
(A little aside on the Nets’ side of this deal: they essentially traded Kevin Durant for nine first-round draft picks. I’d feel more comfortable about that if I didn’t half-believe that if they hit the lottery next year, their current GM might write “Col Flagg” for Adam Silver instead of “Cooper Flagg.”) [from M*A*S*H] by mistake.)
Are the Celtics still the better team? Probably. And it’s worth noting that you don’t win titles by being fixated on one team. The Timberwolves built a team to beat Denver, beat Denver… and then got soundly beaten by a Dallas team that was built very differently. But the makeup of this team suggests they could be just as effective against other contenders. We’ll see how it goes, and it should be a lot of fun to find out.
So let’s congratulate OG on being permanently established as part of the Foundation. Let’s congratulate #Knicksanova on signing a lease on an amazing summer home at LBI. It is summer, after all. It’s that time of year. The hope, the expectation is that this is just the first of many celebrations for this group.
