the knicks and the garden

Mike Vaccaro wrote an awesome column in the Post today which really captures the zeitgeist of Knicks fandom (wow, third post today that is at least tangentially Knickerbocker-related). What the people running Madison Square Garden have done to the World's Most Famous Arena in the past few years is enough to break any New York sports fan's heart, considering how amazingly special the place was in the 1990s.

The very premise of Vaccaro's column implies that the Larry Brown Knicks have a chance to make the Garden special again, but I'm not so sure. When I look at Isiah Thomas' player moves as Knicks' head honcho, I see flawed players acquired by trading other flawed players. Sometimes it feels like he'll make any move in the hopes that some new random assemblage of players will click. I dunno; maybe I'm still hung up on the bruising Knicks of the mid-1990s, or the miracle Knicks of 1999; maybe it will take some time to fall in love with a Knicks team that's long on talent but still feels not quite right. Maybe falling in love with this group will be impossible.

Maybe all they need to do is win.

And another thing: when I look at Larry Brown, I see a guy who's about to realize how hopelessly over his head he is with the players he's stuck with; I just can't see him staying in New York very long. Being coach of the Knicks should mean something, but right now, despite all of the "homecoming" talk, I look at Brown and I think "hired gun." He just doesn't feel like the head coach of the New York Knicks. Don't get me wrong - I'm glad he's here. He's a great coach, and his being here means the franchise still has a semblance of a clue - but I fear that, before too long, he's going to start trying to claw his way out of NYC (like a cat in one of those carry-on cage thingies).