Ah, that familiar inevitability. In recent years, any New York Knick team-building strategy comes with a default presumption of doomed and inevitable endgame. The details don’t usually matter. But the decisions last summer by the Knicks’ then-front office have an impressively sour aftertaste, after they so violently diverged from league-wide norms of minimum offensive competence.
The 2019-20 Knicks were constructed seemingly in spite of the general idea of spacing. Existing now as a reference point, an extreme of non-spacing, a team only to be discussed in whispers at Sloan, late into the night, like some kind of mythical mathematical mistake.