These are the kinds of things that stick to troubled franchises like flypaper. Look, there is no law saying this can’t happen to, say, the Spurs. There is certainly a possibility that Gregg Popovich could get his Twitter account hacked …
(Actually, whom are we kidding: There is a better chance that Popovich will get his own sitcom, with his character playing a sportswriter, than there is of Popovich even signing on to Twitter, let alone tweeting anything, let alone some hacker having a go at the account …)
But, for argument’s sake: It could happen to someone like the Spurs.
It just, you know, never seems to happen to the Spurs. Or the Cavs. Or the Warriors. This kind of thing never seemed to happen to the Knicks in the ’90s, or in the ’70s. Weird stuff finds bad teams. And so weird stuff found the Knicks — who are a very bad basketball team — the last couple of days.
Let’s give Kurt Rambis the benefit of the doubt and say his Twitter account really was hacked. Let’s overlook the fact that if I were a hacker, and I had managed to access the Twitter feed of the head coach of the New York Knicks, I would absolutely have come up with something a little more creative than simply clicking “like” on a porn account’s post. And all of it within the safe boundaries of 140 characters.
Such as: “NOT PLAYING MELO EVER AGAIN! TRADE HIM NOW! #CoachRambisSays”
Or: “TRIANGLE SHMIANGLE! #MyOwnMan”
Or, for those with a little sense of wit and history: “Hey, is Kevin McHale still in the league? #Clothesline #DirtyCeltics #BostonStinks #DontLetTheDoorHitYouOnTheWayOut”
Rambis took great pains Monday to insist he didn’t like the site on his Twitter page. A few hours before the Raptors would blow the Knicks out of the Garden 122-95, after giving his usual state-of-the-team observations and keeping us all up to date on the status of JimmSanity (and yes, by night’s end, the Garden would be chanting Jimmer Fredette’s name), he was asked about dealing with this Twitter-generated distraction.
“It’s unfortunate it happened,” Rambis said. “I dealt with it and I moved on.”
In the Knicks’ doldrums era, the catchphrase of choice was: “The ship be sinkin’.”
Now it’s: “I didn’t do the likin’.”
So he dealt with his off-court distractions in much the same way Derek Fisher used to: foisting upon a weary fan base the basketball atrocities that are Jose Calderon and Kyle O’Quinn, keeping Jerian Grant mostly in bubble wrap, looking positively perplexed at how to keep the avalanche of awfulness from engulfing his team.
Maybe Knicks fans could empathize with Rambis; they’re used to watching obscene material night after night, year after year. It’s just not classified as pornography.
What’s really infuriating is that the more the Knicks try to streamline their program, the more they try to be all about basketball and all about the present and the future, there always seems to be something … else.
Again: Give Rambis the benefit of the doubt here.
But this does come on the heels of the Fisher Era, defined by a lot of losing and a lot of confused looks on the sidelines, and also fundamentally doomed the moment he became embroiled in his soap-opera story line with Matt Barnes’ estranged wife.
Fisher is divorced and was doing nothing illegal by acting like a player so soon after playing his last game — same as Rambis would be doing nothing illegal if he actually does enjoy the occasional visit to an adults-only site.
It was Fisher’s judgment that was ultimately called into question. In this case, it was the Knicks who chose to actively defend Rambis — again their right, though you can surely question why they needed to make this a bigger story than it probably would’ve been had they simply ignored it.
And, as happens so often, the important stuff felt like a footnote.
The basketball feels like an asterisk. Of course, when the basketball is this abysmal, maybe that’s also beside the point.
The Knicks don’t go looking for these things. But these are the kinds of things that seem to find franchises that lose their way and lose their mojo. The Mets didn’t go looking for that marijuana story a few years ago, yet there was Bobby Valentine one unforgettable afternoon, mimicking what it’s like to be on the weed.
If the Knicks entered Monday’s game at 33-24 instead of the other way around, maybe this still happens, maybe it’s a story, or maybe we all get to laugh a little bit on the way to the playoffs. A little mojo goes a long way. Then again, so does deleting your Twitter account. No need to worry about hackers then. Or careless thumbs.