Spurs vs Knicks Game 1 sets the tone for which roster construction will take center stage
The Knicks and Spurs built contenders from different blueprints; tonight the NBA starts deciding which one was right.
For the entirety of the Golden Empire, every front office in basketball has been chasing the same ghost. Steph Curry and the Warriors broke the sport and ever since, everyone has been trying to figure out how to build the next dynasty. Tonight, two franchises tip off the NBA Finals with completely different answers. By the end of June, one of those answers gets a parade.
This is the latest referendum on how you build a champion.
One team collected every player the league left on the shelf and assembled something beautiful. The other spent years losing hella basketball games until a seven-foot-four basketball alien fell out of the sky and into their lap for them to build a solar system around him. One bet on finding players everyone else underestimated. The other bet on finding a player nobody could miss.
The Spurs meanwhile are the franchise everyone points to when they defend losing for lottery odds, because Tim Duncan already worked once. San Antonio has been here before. They know exactly what it looks like when a generational big man in silver and black starts stacking championships. They drafted Wembanyama first, Dylan Harper second, Stephon Castle fourth, Devin Vassell 11th, and arrived at the Finals with a core so young their stars are still on rookie deals.
Brunson was not supposed to be this. Dallas let him walk because they did not think he was this. Half the league looked at a 6-foot-2 guard and saw a ceiling. The Knicks looked at the same player and saw a franchise. If he wins a title, every scouting department in basketball is going to spend the next decade asking how they missed it, because the guard deemed too small to carry Dallas will have carried New York to its first championship since 1973. That’s a heckuva redemption arc. The Knicks built an entire Finals roster out of players somebody else looked at and said, “nah, we’re good.”
If New York wins, a lot of executives are going to have to stare at their own mistakes. The Knicks did not discover hidden stars as most of these players were sitting in plain sight. New York simply identified them correctly when everyone else identified them wrong.
The Spurs can become proof that tanking does not just work, it works fast! It works spectacularly and it works so well that a franchise can go from drafting first overall to holding a parade before the rookie contract is half over. If Wemby does it, the conversation about his ceiling does not continue. The ceiling collapses and gets replaced with something that has no name yet.
And here is the layer that does not get discussed enough. A Spurs championship would validate patience with youth. Every front office currently investing in a 20-year-old wondering if they need to trade him for veteran insurance is watching Mitch Johnson coach Harper and Castle through the biggest stage in the sport and doing the math differently now.
By the end of June, one of these two theories will have a championship attached to it. The rest of the league will spend the summer pretending they believed in it all along.
Watched G1 with colleagues in a crowded bar in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC. Wild Knicks buzz all over town. I’m congenitally predisposed to root against all NY and LA teams, but it’s hard to resist jumping on the Knicks bandwagon. They’ve always been the most likable NY team, and this iteration with their lack of a top 5 superstar, Mike Brown-infused strength in numbers, and never-say-die spirit is particularly easy to love.
We just moved up to northern Westchester County this winter, but for the previous five years lived in southern Westchester, where Jalen Brunson was our 5-mins-away neighbor (Larchmont, pretty, bucolic little town which in Bay Area terms I would liken to say Ross or San Anselmo). He and his fam were oft-seen and much beloved at our local organic market / garden store, which always tickled me.
Another anecdote that will both date and locate me. As a kid in Cambridge, MA in the early ‘80s, my buddy and I used to go 16 Celtics games a year as part of a “BirdPak” — 16 tickets for 96 bucks total, which now blows my mind to ponder. He was a Knicks fan, I was a Celtics fan. (How I switched allegiance from Cs to Ws in the late ‘80s is a topic for another post). We sat in the second balcony at the old Garden, which were actually fantastic seats, right around halfcourt and steeply raked so right on top of the action. Still remember the beery, peanutty, pissy, throwuppy smells in the narrow stairs that led up to the balcony…
There was a rabid Cs fan old-timer in our section called “Fonzie” who would lead the chants. Being a Masshole sports fan, he could have been mean to my Knicks fan friend, but he was actually super sweet about it, even in games where we were facing the Knicks (partly I’m sure cos we were like 13 years old, but still, the polar opposite of the vibe at a Sox/MFY game at Fenway). Anyway, blah blah, there was a line about the Knicks he uttered on a couple of occasions that my friend and I have endlessly quoted since, and seems particularly apt now: “I’m a Knicks fan, you’re a Knicks fan, everybody’s a Knicks fan!!!”
TLDR: LFGK!!!!
I feel like the ultimate bandwagon after rooting for the Spurs so hard against OKC but now I'm rooting against them