You know you've had a lousy season when it’s the final game of the campaign and you’re trying to placate fans with free food and non-alcoholic beverages.
This has been part of the Knicks’ playbook in the past and now Phil Jackson, of all people, is embracing the very same losing culture.
Back in the days of Isiah Thomas and Stephon Marbury, the Knicks also handed out hot dogs and sodas to mark the end of other losing campaigns, thinking that would satisfy the customers who shell out more money for tickets than any other fan base in the NBA.
On Fan Appreciation tomorrow night in the Garden, here’s something that should be on the menu: A loss to the Detroit Pistons. But will the Knicks do what’s best for their future and tank the finale?
Food for thought: It’s in their best interest to lose.
“It’s not like they’ve got any talent on the floor, as it is,’’ one NBA GM told me, assessing what Derek Fisher has had to work with during the franchise’s worst season in its history. “So they’ve been winning and doing it with backups.’’
The shame of it is, the Knicks’ current two-game winning streak is wreaking havoc with their future. For most of the season they held the distinction of having the league’s worst record -- and the best chance of coming out of this living nightmare with the best odds of getting the No. 1 overall pick in June’s draft.
But winning in Orlando and Atlanta over the past four days means that with 17 wins they now longer own the top seed for the weighted lottery, having surrendered that position to Minnesota, now owner of the worst record in the NBA, with 16 victories. Say what you want about the Timberwolves, but at least they’re ending the season the right way -- in terms of putting themselves in the best position possible to win the draft lottery, with 11 straight losses that figures to continue with one final defeat to the Oklahoma City Thunder tomorrow night.
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If form holds, Minnesota will finish with the best shot of winning the rights to draft No. 1 in June, meaning that if they win the lottery they’ll get to decide whether to take Jahlil Okafor of Duke or Karl-Anthony Towns of Kentucky, the top two big men and projected top picks. That’s the position the Knicks should have aspired to, but have thrown away over a few lousy wins here in the final week of the season. And here’s the potentially bad sign for the Knicks: With this winning streak, they don’t know if they’ll even have the No. 2 seed going into the lottery.
If they end the season with three straight wins by defeating lottery-bound Detroit, which has nothing left to play for, and if the Sixers lose to the Miami Heat, then the Knicks would jeopardize their ability to draft whomever is left over between Okafor and Towns. In that scenario, they and the Sixers would finish with the same 18-64 record and then flip a coin to determine which team would have the higher slot for the weighted draft lottery. It’s a long way from picking whichever big man is still on the board, to suddenly being left with the third-best player in the draft.
The Knicks could lose even more ground and end up with a worst pick, depending on what happens on lottery day. And this is all because they didn’t close out the season by trying to... well, not win. Whether it was by using different rotations or via a different end-of-game lineup or even activating himself, Fisher should have rigged it to keep the Knicks sitting at 16 wins. Of course there’s a segment of Knicks fans who already have seen the No. 1 pick slip through Jackson’s hands and can’t be very happy if that's the way it turns out.
“I’m sure people are upset with us,” Fisher told the media after the Knicks stunned the East-leading Hawks in Atlanta on Monday night. “But I don’t think you can ever go out there and basically try and not play your best. Those two things don’t go together... That has no bearing on these guys lives and their careers and their livelihoods -- who we pick next year. This is about them and they went out and played that way.”
But this is where Fisher is wrong. It’s not about these Knicks, because most won’t even make the team next season. It’s about the franchise and doing what’s in the best interest of the organization and its rebuilding program.
If it looks as if Fisher has been clueless for most of the time as a rookie head coach, the way this season is ending, on an unwanted up-tick, merely clinches it.
Longtime New York columnist Mitch Lawrence continues to write about pro basketball, as he’s done for the last 22 years. His columns for NBCNewYork.com on the Knicks, Brooklyn Nets and the NBA, along with other major sports, will appear twice weekly. Follow him on Twitter @Mitch_Lawrence.
