Things are going pretty well for the Knicks right now. They’re fresh off winning the NBA Cup, and despite being extremely shorthanded, they pulled off an epic comeback against the Pacers last night to get within 1.5 games of the Pistons for the Eastern Conference lead. Knicks fans have to feel like they have a real shot to make the Finals for the first time since 1999.
The Knicks haven’t won a title since 1973, and in a slap in the face to the world’s largest media market, they’ve been turned down again and again by the league’s biggest stars once they hit free agency.
As Pablo Torre Finds Out has repeatedly shown us, the Knicks’ lack of success in free agency hasn’t been for a lack of trying. Last year, Torre uncovered the 2010 recruiting video, featuring an in-character Tony and Carmela Soprano, that the team made for LeBron James.
Just last week, the show revealed that in the summer of 2019, the Knicks paid the Wu-Tang clan millions in order to woo Kevin Durant with an original song.
That summer was a desperate one for the Knicks, and for good reason. They were coming off an abysmal 17-65 season, the worst in team history, but with so many superstars available, they tried to shoot their shot with all of them.
Not only did they make that music video for KD, they also shot a custom video for Kyrie Irving in which they implied that the city would be filled with babies named after him if he brought the Knicks a title.
Weirder still, the Knicks also commissioned a video for Kawhi Leonard that was tucked inside a custom pizza box in which the two-time Finals MVP was played by comedian Jay Pharoah.
It’s a surreal trip that features Ben Stiller, Tracy Morgan, Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che and Kenan Thompson, and Jason Biggs joking for some reason about what his character did in the movie American Pie.
As Torre has extensively documented over the last few months, Kawhi ended up choosing the Clippers in free agency, in part because he allegedly was promised millions of dollars in extra money, in violation of the NBA’s salary cap.
Money talks, and though the Knicks obviously put a lot of effort into their recruiting tactics, they walked away empty-handed that summer. Kawhi went to the Clippers, and though KD and Kyrie joined forces in New York, it was on the Nets, not the Knicks.
Thankfully for the Madison Square Garden faithful, times have changed, and the Knicks own the city for the first time since Patrick Ewing and John Starks were doing their thing. Jalen Brunson has become a superstar, and there are even whispers that Giannis Antetokounmpo has the blue and orange at the top of his trade wishlist.
The NBA is entertaining enough on its own, but Torre has been killing it lately with all of his incredible basketball-adjacent content. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m about to go blast that Wu-Tang Kevin Durant song again.
