The Knicks Fix

Channing Frye greeted a few beat writers outside the Knick locker room by nodding and saying, “Piranhas.”

And I’m going to take offense to that? This happened just before I shuffled down to the Celtics locker room to stake out Sebastien Telfair and see if he’d make any more comment about his incident from last Monday night in Manhattan.

Piranhas, indeed.

A few random thoughts on a day when I traveled up to Uncasville, Conn. to watch the Knicks get their doors blown off by the Celtics at a beautiful place called Mohegan Sun:

1. Can we bring writing back to sports writing? I wondered this aloud with a fellow sportswriter the other day: what would readers rather have – A story loaded with innocuous quotes that say nothing and inane statistics that reveal little? Or a lengthy, opinionated commentary about the game, the team and all observations in the voice of the writer, the eyes and ears of the reader?

Discuss. Get back to me.

2. Forgettable game for the Knicks. But it was a preseason game and Isiah Thomas clearly had it in his mind to play his bench. When Paul Miller and Milone Clark get on the court in the second quarter, you know the first priority isn’t winning the game. It’s seeing what you got on the bench. Early indication? Not much.

3. With so much extensive gar-bage time, I found myself paying attention to so many other things than the game. Like Neil Patrick Harris, who was sitting court side, and how he clearly has jacked up since his Doogie Howser days. You think that has anything to do with the fact that as an adult he has to deal with idiots mocking him with “Yo Doooogie How-zah,” which he heard last night as many times as the Knicks turned the ball over?

4. I also noticed over-the-top starstruck people who lose all sense of sensibility when they find themselves within shouting distance of the Knicks bench. One dude kept calling Renaldo Balkman’s name, holding his camera phone, hoping he’d smile and pose for a picture. Balkman sent his message loud and clear by draping a towel over his head. The fan grumbled and walked away.

Down by 30 in the third quarter and you’re getting impatient with an NBA rookie because he’s not in the mood for a photo op?

Yeah, it’s the players who are out of touch with the fans.

5. It’s been a few years since I’ve been in an arena that played a lot of hip-hop (it’s not really common in the NHL, in case you were wondering), so I have to adjust. Hey, I love all kinds of music – really – and have plenty of rap in my collection, like Brand Nubian, Black Sheep and A Tribe Called Quest from my college days and more recent stuff like Common and K-OS and Jay-Z (the Numb Encore is, as the kids say, off the chain). But some of this repetitive stuff that sounds like a dude barking while a CD is skipping makes me ill. What happened to the lyrical artistry of Q-Tip, Slick Rick and my all-time favorite, Chuck D?

I’m done like Michael Olowokandi’s NBA career.