The New Yorker:

Watching the New York Knickerbockers this season felt like being on a rollercoaster whose entire path was a vertiginous drop.

By Vinson Cunningham

Farewell to the 2024-2025 Knicks. I’m quite sure that I’ve never rooted so desperately, with such an uneasy blend of pleasure and pain, delight and despair, for such a confusing team. I could never figure out how to think about them—or, in fact, whether I even liked them—even as they zigged and zagged through a playoff run for the ages, which ended on Saturday night, with a pitiful 125–108 loss to the Indiana Pacers in Game Six of the N.B.A.’s Eastern Conference Finals.

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.

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