On one level, it’s hard to shake this part of it from your mind. Think about how many times you and your best friends from college talked at the tail ends of after-hours parties about putting enough scratch together a few years after graduation to maybe, someday soon, rent a house down the Jersey shore or out in the Hamptons for a week.
Did that ever happen for you? Did life get in the way? Life usually gets in the way.
Well, Jalen Brunson, Josh Hart, Donte DiVincenzo and Mikal Bridges just got their Shore house. It’s a little different than the blueprints you may have had in mind those 4:30 a.m. days. Instead of loud music and free-flowing kegs and midnight swims in their future, there’s an endless string of sweaty basketball practices and four-games-in-six nights road trips. But then, we all have different versions of paradise, right?
So yes, in a sports world where we seem constantly besieged by how this player wants this coach fired and these teammates aren’t on speaking terms and Player X is furious at the contract Player Y just signed … enjoy this. We’ve already seen how much Brunson, Hart and DiVincenzo enjoy playing with each other. It was obvious how much Bridges pined to get back in the band, and every response so far has been genuine. This is rare stuff.
And, of course, will not mean a thing if we wake up some morning next winter and the Knicks are 23-25. That’s the reminder. That’s the thing that forces you to fold up the feel-good part of this whole thing and tuck it in your pocket. Leon Rose didn’t make this trade so “Roommates” could get more downloads. He did it because he thinks this narrows the gap with the Celtics.
And here’s the best part of it: It does.
And with OG Anunoby officially back in the fold for five years and $212.5 million, the one caveat to all this is the belief that Julius Randle returns to form with a surgically repaired shoulder. And maybe this, too: For all the Villanova love, for all of Randle’s accomplishments as a Knick, Anunoby is now the highest-paid Knick (for the moment, at least) at $36.6 million against next year’s cap.
How will that sit with Randle, who is also due a new contract? And how will that sit with the ’Nova crew — especially Brunson, also due a hefty salary upgrade at some point? We like to think such coarse matters as money don’t intrude on the greater good, but that’s only been disproven a million times before. That doesn’t mean it’ll happen here. Maybe it won’t.
If it doesn’t, if Anunoby can stay on the floor and Randle comes back as fully invested in the Knicks’ altered power dynamic as he seemed to be in the two weeks leading up to his injury, then the Knicks are a wing-heavy team that looks custom-built to take a run at the Celtics by making them ask a simple question:
What would the Celtics do if they had to try to beat the Celtics?
It also speaks volumes as to the trust Rose has in Tom Thibodeau. It isn’t any coach that can be charged with championship-level aspirations and told to do that without a first-tier superstar on the team. The Knicks are a team that will succeed by its pH levels: It’ll be all about the chemistry. Thibodeau is the lead chemist.
And what he has now is a team that clearly mimics the Celtics:
One top-10 player: Brunson/Jayson Tatum.
One next-level supporting star: Randle/Jalen Brown.
One selfless two-way dynamo: Anunoby/Jrue Holiday.
And then a gaggle of right-for-the-fit supporting players. Adding Bridges to DiVincenzo, Hart and Deuce McBride gives them a counter to Derrick White and Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford. More importantly, you have two defensive-minded wings — Anunoby and Bridges — to try to neutralize Tatum and Brown.
(As a brief aside on the Nets’ side of this deal: they have now, in essence, turned Kevin Durant into nine first-round picks. I would feel better about that if I didn’t half believe that if they win the lottery next year, instead of submitting “Cooper Flagg” to Adam Silver, the current GM might write down “Col. Flagg” [from M*A*S*H] by mistake.)
Are the Celtics still the better team? Maybe. And it’s worth noting that you can’t win a title obsessing about one team. The Timberwolves built a team to beat Denver, and they beat Denver … and then got cold-cocked by a Dallas team built completely differently. But the construction of this team suggests it’ll be equally effective against the other contenders. We’ll see. And it ought to be awfully fun to find out.
So, yes, celebrate OG settling into a permanent part of the foundation. Celebrate the fact that #Knicksanova just signed a lease for a killer summer house on LBI. It’s summer, after all. It’s time for that. The hope — the expectation — is that’s just the first of multiple celebrations for this group.
