Opinion: This is easily one of the 20 most embarrassing Knicks moments since 2017
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Oh, how the unmighty have fallen!
Since the day the Knicks ran Latvian unicorn Kristaps Porzingis out of town in February, long-suffering fans have clung to hope that the team might somehow not bungle all the cap room it created for the anticipated NBA free-agent frenzy now very much underway.
But the Knicks bungle everything all the time always, and — surprise, surprise — the franchise that found way too much money to give Tim Hardaway Jr. was unwilling to pony up a max deal for Kevin Durant.
So the Knicks watched as their outer-borough rival Brooklyn Nets added Durant, Kyrie Irving and DeAndre Jordan to a team that actually made the playoffs last season, when the Knicks finished with a league-worst 17-65 record in pursuit of a No. 1 overall draft pick they did not get.
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If this isn't rock-bottom for the once-but-not-at-all-recently proud Knicks franchise, it's easily one of their 20 most humiliating moments of the last two years.
The Knicks have been publicly burned by Richard Jefferson, Samuel L. Jackson, a subway ad, and, possibly, the advertisement on their own jerseys, and they had a weird online feud with Porzingis while he was still undoubtedly the most talented player on their roster.
Owner James Dolan, an outrageously petty man who inherited his fortune, actually unironically plays blues music and gigged with his band during the 2017 NBA Draft. He also wrote a song called "I Should've Known," alluding to longtime friend turned alleged serial sex offender Harvey Weinstein, even though Dolan himself was found liable in Anucha Browne Sanders' 2007 sexual harassment lawsuit against Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden, and even though Dolan later — astoundingly — hired the very same Isiah Thomas to run his WNBA team.
Under Dolan's bizarre, self-defeating, fascist stewardship of the franchise, the Knicks have ostracized the likes of celebrated actor Ethan Hawke, franchise legend Charles Oakley, the New York Daily News, and any random stranger who dares criticize Dolan for piloting a trainwreck that has somehow endured for decades. It's though the train caught derailed then exploded then tumbled off a cliff then splashed into the ocean and is now fully submersed and plummeting to the seafloor but still somehow on fire.
To call the Knicks a clown-shoes operation would be an insult to clown shoes. Clown shoes actually protect clowns' feet, and they make a silly squeaking noise when they get stepped on. We laugh with clown shoes. We laugh at the Knicks. Their only real value, at this point, is in making the woebegone Mets look vaguely sensible and mildly functional. The only strange thing about Sunday's free-agent news is that anyone thought Kevin Durant might want to play for the Knicks in the first place.