Postscript
Dear Michelle:
The 2018–19 NBA season had its interesting moments, leading to a wild, rousing finish, but to be honest, for me it ultimately fell flat, like trying to dribble a ball rapidly leaking air. That’s because after nearly forty years, you weren’t around to share it with. And I know what you would tell me: Grow up. Move on. I’m working at that, but life hasn’t been quite the same without you, my life coach and special friend.
Beth tells me that I have seemed particularly melancholy on Sundays—our phone catch-up day—wandering around the house after the morning news shows as if I was supposed to be doing something, trying to remember exactly what it was. So I’m hoping that writing these words will compensate for what has gone unsaid—though I must tell you right from the top that the less said about the 2018–19 Knicks, the better! More on that later.
I should begin with something I know will make your day. Not that you were one to celebrate the misfortune of others, but we both know how little use you had for Carmelo Anthony. So it seems that his chronic self-absorption finally caught up with him. Sick of his act after one season, the Thunder shipped him to the Rockets in Houston soon after you left us. That deal raised a whole lot of eyebrows, since it meant a reunion with Mike D’Antoni.
It was one of those overhyped NBA transactions—the aging Melo teaming up with Chris Paul and James Harden to create another so-called Big 3. D’Antoni bit his lip and insisted that what had happened in New York was long forgotten. Melo claimed he was at the point in his career that he could play for anybody. And then their remarriage lasted exactly . . . ten games! The fact that Paul, Melo’s good buddy and the outspoken president of the players’ union, apparently didn’t vouch for him or utter one public word in protest after the Rockets basically told him to just go home is all I—and you—need to know. So go ahead, Michelle, pour yourself a heavenly glass of wine. I’ll toast your instincts from here.
Speaking of purging and prophecies, I emailed Blair to ask what did ever happen to your condo-ful of Knicks memorabilia—which you, of course, predicted many times would be deposited in the trash soon after you were gone. She responded that each of the kids took a T-shirt and her dear friend Zander Lane made off with a bobblehead. “That’s about it,” she wrote. “However, on the bright side, I can hear Mom saying (almost as if she’s standing next to me), you mean I got something right? She said we’d toss it and we did. I know she’d rather be right any day than have us keep all her Knicks stuff.”
So, congratulations on that, Michelle, but you also should know that your children held a beautiful celebration of your life and there was no shortage of guests—so that prediction you got totally wrong! You were loved by so many. You are missed. Blair also saved and shared with her siblings—and me!—many of your Christmas letters, dating back to the midsixties. Reading your annual life updates and tributes to your children, I don’t know how anybody could have ever questioned your devotion to them. Your letters were so well written, so sweet yet sardonic. They reminded me of how you wanted to be a journalist—and had you been born twenty-five years later, there is no doubt in my mind that you could have been Selena Roberts, the first woman to have written Sports of the Times.
Speaking of which, I have continued contributing the occasional column or story for the Times, though opening night was the only night I attended a Knicks game during the entire 2018–19 season—and that was because I correctly suspected that the Knicks PR staff would do the right thing and honor you, with a bouquet of flowers that was left on your seat until game time. Outside of that night, though—and as you suspected when we watched the draft from your hospital room the last time I visited—you didn’t miss a damn thing. The 2018–19 Knicks won seventeen games, tying for the worst franchise record with the team Phil Jackson ran as president in 2014–15. Imagine paying a thousand dollars a night for that! (Wynn, ensconced in Florida, told me he only went to one game and had more or less ceded the tickets to the Goodhart brothers.)
OK, I really buried the lede because I didn’t want to begin with news that I know would have had you spitting venom. Not only did Kristaps Porzingis fail to return from his knee injury, but the Knicks shocked everyone early in the New Year by trading him to Dallas, along with a few overpaid players to clear enough salary cap space to sign two premier free agents from the 2019 summer class.
Throughout the season, all we heard was that Kevin Durant would leave the Warriors for the Knicks and that Kyrie Irving would walk out on the Celtics in July 2019 to partner with him in New York—along with whichever stud college player the Knicks would extract from the draft. Instant championship contender!
The college player Knicks fans were fixated on was Zion Williamson, a one-and-done sensation from Duke, said to be a generational talent, just like LeBron. So, yes, another much-ballyhooed Knicks plan to organically build a team around Porzingis was scrapped in the pursuit of a get-rich-quick infusion of superstar talent their front office—including James Dolan—was practically guaranteeing.
Then the draft lottery concluded with the Knicks among the last four teams standing and the one with the best statistical chance to land the number one pick. For a few minutes, or until the end of the commercial break, it was all happening! Then the pick went to New Orleans. The Knicks finished third, which deflated the fan base until it realized that
