David Fizdale's Firing Is Further Proof No One Should Care About the Knicks

With so many interesting storylines around the league, it's well past time we ignored what the hapless Knicks are up to.

Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

The Knicks fired head coach David Fizdale on Friday, an inevitability that was set into motion after the team once again failed to acquire any star players.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Knicks just fired their head coach. David Fizdale is the latest casualty in Madison Square Garden, which means New York will need a seventh(!) person before the end of this decade to continue running this team into oblivion. It’s hard for me to muster any outrage or emotion about this latest event, because the Knicks simply don’t deserve it.

I really don’t understand why this franchise receives as much attention as it does. The owner is a miserable person. The P.R. staff has at times been vindictive on his behalf. The Knicks have made it out of the first round of the playoffs only once since the start of the 2000 season, and haven’t participated in the postseason since 2013, the only year in the last 15 that can be described as anything more than a mild success. Do the Grizzlies receive a Knicks-level of scrutiny when they make a coaching change? What about the Pacers? You know, teams that have actually had more than a brief moment of relevance in the last decade.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or, frankly, a five-year-old’s intuition to figure out why the Knicks fired Fizdale. Once again, the team is awful. Sure, maybe Fizdale should have played the young guys more. But who cares? This team was going to be bad either way, and Fizdale was never going to win enough games to satisfy management’s whims. New York’s only hope this year was to sign big free agents over the summer—something James Dolan was comically confident in—and once July came to pass and all the Knicks could do was stockpile power forwards, everyone with one-eighth of a brain cell knew where this was headed.

If I want people to learn anything from the latest Knicks “drama,” it’s this: Please don’t pay any attention to this franchise until they’ve earned it. There are so many better teams around the league. So many better players. Maybe one day the Knicks will do something worthy of your time, but I promise that’s not happening now. It baffles me how much ink is spilled over a team that current college freshmen have seen play exciting basketball for precisely one season.

Am I a hypocrite for writing this much about the Knicks when I’m telling you not to care about them? It’s possible. So allow me to suggest other stories around the league that are actually interesting. Carmelo Anthony has revived his career in Portland. The Spurs, an actual proud franchise, may miss the playoffs. Erik Spoelstra has turned the Heat back into contenders. The Kings used their G-League team as a basketball laboratory. See how cool the NBA can be!

The bottom line is this: The world is on fire and there are too many actually good and interesting basketball teams to spend one more second of your day thinking about the Knicks, their head-coaching search, what Fizdale’s firing means, or anything else regarding this utterly helpless franchise. Maybe one day the Knicks will sign or draft a very good player and start to build something resembling a bright future. That day isn’t today, and there will probably be more mind-numbingly bad decisions in the days to come. I’m not saying the Knicks will never be good again. I’m just saying don‘t waste your time in the interim.