On the one hand, this year’s Knicks—already blessed with the presence of Jalen Brunson, the superstar point guard with moves like a modern dancer and the taciturn comportment of a movie cowboy—began the season by adding a new star to the mix: the profusely talented offensive big man Karl-Anthony Towns. At his best, Towns shoots like an archer, drives to the hoop like a rugby bruiser, and glides on his pivot foot, one smooth semicircle after another, like a grade-school protractor with its point puncturing the paper. He somehow expresses all of this sophistication, though, with the posture and the sulking body language of a middle-school kid halfway through a startled reckoning with his strange new body. You’ve never seen someone so futuristic and so awkward all at once. Much of the drama of the long regular season was figuring out how Towns would fit next to Brunson as the statement diamond in a seemingly gaudy ring whose outer setting included the accents Josh Hart, O. G. Anunoby, and—another newcomer—Mikal Bridges. The answer never really came, not in any clear or stable way. On some nights, the Brunson-Towns combo seemed unstoppable—to slow down one of these whizzes was to set the other perilously free. Especially when the pair engaged each other in the fleet tango of pick-and-roll, they created impossible choices for teams who hoped to defend them. Toward the beginning of the season, the Knicks’ offense often sang. Just as often, though, the team’s scoring production could go quiet for minutes at a time, and the defense—neither Brunson nor Towns is dependable on that end—could go correspondingly wonky. And the Knicks, on the way to an admittedly impressive fifty-one wins, amassed a putrid 0–10 record against the élite teams who were supposed to be their peers. My assessment of the team when the regular season gave way to the playoffs was a shrug. Who knew? I’m in a group chat on WhatsApp called Bing Bong (Knicks). I’ve been part of the chat for about a year and a half, and I have met almost none of its thirty-odd members. My buddy, Patterson, one of the admins, invited me one day, and that was that. All day, people drop in rumors about trades, assertions based on stats, and complaints about whichever Knick is screwing up the worst. Come playoffs, the volume picks up and the messages take on a tortured tone. This year, the vibe was especially tetchy. As the Knicks survived a weird first-round matchup against the Detroit Pistons in which every game was closer than it ought to have been, my chatmates vacillated, sometimes arguing that the Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau should be fired, sometimes expressing a serene and semi-mystical belief that Brunson—especially good in high-pressure moments—would bring us through. Eventually, the faith in Brunson cashed out: at the end of Game Six, he crossed over the Pistons’ young, athletic forward Ausar Thompson, sending the defender skidding in the wrong direction, then hit a game-winner. It was ecstasy—even if the drug was laced with worry over how needlessly difficult that first series had been. In the next round, against the Boston Celtics—last year’s champions—something strange happened. Despite trailing behind by more than twenty points in each of the first two games, in Boston, the Knicks stormed back and won both. In a way, this rare, almost impossible bit of business was a quintessential display for this year’s Knicks. That they repeatedly got down by so much in the first place was a sign of their flaws—a, by now, truly troubling offense that only, it seemed, made space for one scorer at a time, usually Brunson, and a defense that was worse than the sum of its parts. The Knicks still hadn’t learned to communicate on the floor, and often missed coverages by a mile, leading to a pageant of unmolested open jumpers. They were fortunate to have encountered, right on time, an efflorescence of the Celtics’ own worst traits: a stubborn reliance on three-pointers and a certain stiffening in offensive flow when the score got tight. Nobody I knew—not even the sunniest Bing Bonger—thought the Knicks would beat the Celtics. But suddenly the way was made. All that stood between the Knicks and the N.B.A. Finals were the Indiana Pacers. Heed Garnett! For me, the Knicks’ high points were all bit players, especially the tall, slim center Mitchell Robinson. Robinson was drafted by the Knicks back in 2018, and has improbably become the team’s longest-tenured player. He’s fought injuries, and it has seemed that his talent for rim protection would never reach its full flowering. In each series against the Celtics and the Pacers, though, he was a revelation. He’s always switching defenders with his teammates, running forward and backward as if completing a particularly tough drill, sometimes seeming to cover an entire team on his own. He grabbed one offensive rebound after another, extending possessions for the Knicks and making their long game-saving runs possible through sheer effort and force of will. Right now, the Knicks, despite their talent, lack a reliable personality. I wish they could play seven Robinsons. Another standout was the sharpshooter Landry Shamet, who, as I will never tire of pointing out, looks uncannily like one of my favorite writers, Jean Toomer. Why this means so much to me, I do not know. My fondest memories will probably be of the scene on the sidelines at Madison Square Garden, where a flock of celebrities made their own parallel entertainment. There was Spike Lee, of course, but also Ben Stiller, who is making his case to succeed Lee as Fan-in-Chief, plus Tracy Morgan, the former Knick Stephon Marbury, forever-city-kid Timothée Chalamet, in increasingly roguish outfits, and “Law & Order” icon Mariska Hargitay. Their familiar faces soothed me in an unexpected way. I guess they reminded me that this was just a show—just TV. The whole point is that there’ll be another season. ♦