Okay I do care if the Knicks win, but my primary goal in watching basketball is to see a good game, and last night's overtime loss to the Rockets was that. It was dramatic because Melo was out with a sickness, and that made it possible for the other Knicks to shine.
I prefer the Knicks without Melo. It's a more balanced team, harder to defend. You don't know where the shot is coming from. With Melo on the court, the center of gravity is undeniable. He's going to get the ball. And no one can shine brighter.
And KP isn't shining as bright as he was a couple of weeks ago, and that's fine. He's a young dude in his rookie season. Give him a year or two, if he doesn't get injured, before judging him.
Al McGuire, the great college coach at Marquette, once said "Give me four Dennards and a star and I can get you into the NCAAs." The Dennards were Kenny, who played a supporting role to three stars on "Forever's Team," the '77 to '81 Duke Blue Devils.
Kenny was a foul-prone rebounder, shooter, defender and floor burner with approximately no moves and enough emotion to fire up his whole team no matter what. That team had three stars: Jim Spanarkel, Mike Gminski and Gene Banks, all of whom went with Kenny to the NBA. But none of them were the equal of the greats that win championships: Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Steph Curry, Tim Duncan.
Nor is Melo, hate to say. He has his Dennards, but he's not the equal of those others, because he's not on the same page. Nor sure why. He's a brilliant scorer and not bad at the rest of it; but he always seems to be playing for himself, even when he shares the ball, which we've seen him do. There's just something missing. Kobe is another self-involved ball hog, with equally good reason (he's better than everybody else), but also a brilliant defender with a huge fire in his belly for the whole team. Melo isn't a defender and has no fire. Maybe Fisher can coach something into the dude, but I don't have much hope for that.
Until Melo leaves the Knicks it's going to be all about him, and that's the problem. Why is he like that? Like you, I don't know. He's a #2 guy. A good buddy. A sidekick. He's not a leader. He's too soft-spoken, too easy-going. If he burns it's not visible from the outside. We disappoint Melo, but he expects that from us (us being his teammates and fans). As Clyde likes to say, he dreams of ways to lose, not win.
That's so key. I watched the Patriots-Broncos game yesterday. Tom Brady and that whole team are always looking at ways to win. They didn't win that one, losing a sudden-death in overtime. But Brady is like Montana and just a handful of other quarterbacks who are always thinking outside the how-do-we-lose box. In football terms, Melo is brilliant at scoring when he has the ball. But he's no quarterback. Because quarterbacks only want to keep the ball when there are no other options.
Interesting stat: the player with the most minutes and assists in the NBA so far this year is Rajon Rondo, who opted for basketball rather than football, but was a star quarterback in the latter.
A meta-comment -- I was reading your first paragraph, when the second paragraph showed up. It was one of those magic moments. ;-)
Is it a blogging app or is it a chat app?
I was experimenting with the UI here. Didn't know you could break paragraphs, then suspected the method was like that of Facebook: shift-return. (Return posts; shift-return breaks paragraphs or starts a new one.)
Yes, Andrew Shell asked for that feature, and it was easy to put in. And when you're writing top-level posts, you can put as many paragraphs as you want just by pressing the Return key. I wanted to encourage short comments, and steer people into writing blog posts for the longer stuff. The project is still in development, so it's not all fitting together yet. But I'm learning. ;-)
BTW, I think his illness is this -- three straight losses last week.