Hey there! With the defending champs about to embark on a well-deserved summer as the defending champs, what better time than now, the oasis between the draft and the corpse of what used to be free agency, to get all high and mighty up in our perch as Knick fans and cast judgment on all the loser teams beneath us — specifically, five current and/or historic rivals and/or curiosities.
BOSTON — A week or two from now, the Celtics may look completely different than they do now. Maybe they’ve sprinkled
enough leprechaun dust around to pull another Al Jefferson/KG or Kevin McHale/Robert Parish/Joe Berry Carroll shenanigans. If you had to bet on one team retooling a contender on the fly and coming out ahead, besides the Lakers, you could do worse than placing a fiver on the Red (Auerbach) Devils.
But I can’t live a week or two into the future. I can only live today, and sometimes even that’s pushing it. Today, for the first time in quite some time, I find myself wondering — just who or what are the Boston Celtics, anyway?
For a while they achieved a kind of basketball perfection, featuring a rotation where every player could shoot and play both ends. As the hypocritical, soul-sucking Knick-hating CBA pushed cheap billionaires away from the player-empowering “Big Three” model to teams’ decidedly less romantic search for the strongest weakest link, the Celtics seemed to have cracked the code. Figurative reams of digital press praised them not only for winning just the franchise’s second ‘chip since Rick Brunson was 14, but for Brad Stevens’ gossamer genius in building them to contend for years.
A funny thing happened on the way to paradise, though. The team was sold. Odd, it seemed. The Celtics are a flagship North American sports franchise. They’d literally just won the championship. And the people writing and cashing their checks looked at each other and just said “Peace”?
Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles and the new owners did the *practical* thing, “practical” almost always meaning “cashed in something ineffable and intangible for $$,” using the injury as cover to get rid of Jrue Holiday and three centers who could all shoot, rebound and defend. They were always gonna be better than people expected, but they still did better than that, even. Tatum came back from his Achilles tear in, like, record time, a statement that seems as likely to age well as Joel Embiid. The playoffs exposed the team’s Achilles heel as its cheap-ass owners, who knew Tatum would be back for the postseason and gave their plucky squad all of Nikola Vučević at the trade deadline.
Credit to Stevens for possessing a seemingly soberer view of his team than some of its media fanboys. The Cs fell 10 wins short of a title in 2025, 13 last season. That’s not title contention. That’s . . . *waves haphazardly at what’s come of Denver*. Excepting Vučević, everyone on the books this past season is next season, too. Something’s gotta give, and something ain’t gonna be Tatum. So it’s gotta be Jaylen Brown or Derrick White.
DETROIT –
Going from 14 wins one season to 44 the next? Unprecedented. 44 to 60? Nearly as impressive. Next step? That one’s a doozy. After a bittersweet postseason, the Pistons are firmly in “What do we do now?” territory.
Detroit is neither blind to what ails it nor subtle in pursuing its remedy, and while newly-signed Isaiah Joe will narcotize some of their shooting pains, he isn’t a panacea. The last three Eastern conference champions have featured dynamic offensive duos: Tatum/Brown, Tyrese Haliburton/Pascal Siakam, Jalen Brunson/Karl-Anthony Towns. The Pistons have Cade Cunningham. They need Tobias Harris to not be their second-best offensive player. Kawhi Leonard, Tyler Herro, Norm Powell, Jaylen Brown — more in that vein.
Now Jalen Duren, fresh off All-NBA Third Team honors, is ready to explore sign-and-trades after being underwhelmed by Detroit in contract negotiations. Harris is also an unrestricted free agent. Isaiah Stewart’s in Memphis. Duncan Robinson could be cut loose for $2 million. Kevin Huerter? They don’t know her. Not only are the Pistons in obvious need of a serious talent injection, something they haven’t really had to deal with for, oh, 20 years is rather quite suddenly their new normal. Pressure.
Miami acquired Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’d’ve been a terrifying addition for Detroit. LaMelo Ball is about to co-star in a fascinating experiment alongside Anthony Edwards in Minnesota; might’ve been just as interesting watching him and Cade in tandem. Heck, either of Julius Randle or Naz Reid would level-up the Piston attack. Everyone and their cousin knows what they need. Every time another team acquires an offensive star, whether the Pistons were in or even interested in the player, a pressure builds around general manager Trajan Langdon. How about this guy? Why not this guy? Who’s the next guy? What about him? Even if he himself is unaware of it, that doesn’t mean others around him aren’t unaware, i.e. aware. Got that?
Get this: the Celtics are seemingly nudging Brown out the door this summer. They daren’t send their former Finals MVP to a key conference rival, dare’st they? What would it took to make a trade work? Would Duren appeal to Boston, who’ve preferred to play 5-out but were forced away from that style last year? And if Duren isn’t the Beantown ballast, does Detroit have anyone else who appeals? They wouldn’t consider Ausar Thompson? T’would they?
MIAMI – “Men were deceivers ever/One foot in sea, and one on shore/To one thing constant never.” That’s from Much Ado About Nothing, fitting both in that it describes Antetokounmpo’s schtick the past couple of years and captures my feelings about the Giannis trade in four words. Not that I don’t see what they’re going for.
There are times a team needs a superstar player for reasons having nothing to do with basketball. When Amar’e Stoudemire signed with the Knicks, it felt like the first thing to go right for the franchise in a decade. The Knicks weren’t suddenly title contenders; they weren’t even 50-win contenders. But the Knicks were back. That mattered.
And oh by the way: squint hard enough and you can see STAT’s signing in 2011 as the first pebble to roll in what became the 2026 Knicks’ title-winning avalanche. Stoudemire putting the “Ooooh!” back in New York showed Carmelo Anthony what he was missing. The Melo era ended with him traded to Oklahoma City, for a draft pick the Thunder initially received from the Bulls along with two future/former Knicks, Taj Gibson and Doug McDermott. Chicago got back another someday Knick, Cameron Payne.
Seven months later, that pick was shipped from OKC to New York, along with McDermott and Enes Freedom, with Carmelo going the other way. That pick, the 36th in the 2018 draft, became some kinda player, the best on either team in 2023 and 2025 playoff series whose significant endgame efforts on both ends helped the Knicks end their 53-year title drought.
Which is to say I understand the Heat trading for Antetokoumpo. You can’t make money if you’re broke. It takes some to make more. Miami is the rare NBA “destination” franchise, though it hasn’t been for a while. Jaime Jaquez Jr. and Kel’el Ware are both fun players, but nobody’s uprooting their family to go play with them. With Giannis? Different story.
A little less than two years ago, the Knicks added KAT and Mikal Bridges. They saw a way to assemble a title-worthy starting five, which there’s no guarantee pops up in life, and they took it. It cost them depth and continuity, and that cost them in the ECF vs. Indiana. But with the hard part finished, the Knicks used the following summer and trade deadline to assemble a title-worthy bench.
Maybe Miami’s thinking similarly. Even if Giannis never leads them to a championship, or even comes close, there’s a far better chance some future star takes their talents to South Beach in the next few years to join him than Tyler Herro. So, once and for all, yes, I get it. What I don’t get is any hype beyond that.
If Antetokounmpo were 25 or 28 next season and not turning 32, I could see them playing a bit of the long game, biding a little time to fully clear their books before adding the next Hardaway to their Mourning, Shaq to their Wade, LeBron to their Wade, Bosh to their Wade, etc. If Bam Adebayo’s fit alongside Giannis felt closer to KAT/OG than Ewing/Cartwright, a little wait would seem to promise a big payoff. If. If! If ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands.
Before the deal, the Heat weren’t laying a glove on the Knicks, the Celtics, the Pistons or the Cavs. After the trade, and assuming they fill out the roster with an unexceptional lot of role players and given Miami’s success rate turning seeming joes into pros, what’s changed? Cleveland is suspect enough that it’s possible Antetokounmpo’s ferocity alone could take them down. Beyond that? Nah.
If you’re a Heat fan, this trade is a big deal. If you’re a Bucks fan, same. If you root for any other team, this feels like an oddly “meh” takeaway, given this is a story we’ve been hearing about for at least a year. And if you’d told me back then someone would swap four players and a half-dozen picks and swaps for Giannis, I’d have assumed it was a seismic deal, for one team if not two. Not so much.
CHARLOTTE – Hmm.
Hmmmmmm.
Dunno where to go with this one. Let’s try this: when you think of Mitchell Robinson, what words come to mind? What other basketball players or pro athletes in general does he remind you of? Take a minute or two. Think about it. I’ll wait.
Okay, you’re back? Did you think of A.C. Green? Cal Ripken Jr.? Lou Gehrig? No? No ironmen popped to mind? That’s fair. Mitch is a great many great things, but “durable” isn’t one even his biggest stans would attempt with a straight face. What’s that gotta do with Charlotte’s point guard?
The past six seasons, Mitch has played 270 games, only a handful fewer per those six seasons than LaMelo Ball. But while M-Rob is likely to sign for $45-$50 million the next three years, in that same span Ball will make $130 million. Apart from any and all questions of LaMelo’s style of play/stylings, it’s difficult to be worthy of a max or near-max salary even if you’ve generally been available, and generally Ball hasn’t.
So as counterintuitive as it’d seem, it’d seem the situation calls for recognizing and applauding Charlotte for anticipating a tricky point in their aspiring ascension and successfully moving past it. I’m not sure it does, though. While the Hornets’ 28-10 run to close the season certainly was not much ado about nothing, it’s likely whatever something they were up to was never quite all it appeared to be in the moment. A third of the league spent most of the year tanking. When push came to shoving their way to a playoff spot, the Hornets lost 121-90 to an Orlando team that didn’t score 121 over seven combined games against Detroit.
It’s fair to wonder if the Hornets have any business being self-confident enough to make this kind of move now, and what the optics will be if it backfires. Ball is now cast out, publicly ex-communicated by a sad sack of a franchise. His ego is wounded. He’ll now be playing with by farrrrrr the best teammate he ever has. And it’s fair to wonder if the team might be confusing their success in collecting the right players for once with those players doing the actual work of embettering the team.
I can’t remember where I read this earlier, but Kon Knueppel made well over 40% of his 3s while playing with Ball versus about 37% without him. As a Knicks fan I’m the last person who will ever doubt Coby White, and he’ll cost the Hornets about $20 million less per year than Ball for three years. Still. I wonder, after a postseason watching the Knicks defy the odds over and over again because their shaman had better magic than the other guy, if the Hornets may have short-circuited something special before it got a chance to spread its wings.
CLEVELAND – LOLOLOLOL
