NBA teams
Ramona Shelburne, ESPN Senior Writer 9y

Boring doesn't suit Lakers, Knicks

NBA, Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks

LOS ANGELES -- The jokes are too easy now to be funny anymore. The snickers have subsided. Shoot, the Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks have been so bad for so long this season, nobody even groans. And besides, no joke could be funnier than the product on the court (!). See, not really funny now.

Mostly people in both cities -- and the league as a whole -- just ignore them outside of the occasional Carmelo Anthony or Kobe Bryant update. Most of their games -- including the Knicks' 101-94 win over the Lakers on Thursday night -- have been dropped from the national television schedule. In most other years, this would be alarming. But this season has been so ugly, it almost feels compassionate to let the two franchise fade away quietly without calling extra attention to their misery.

Almost ...

These are still the Lakers and the Knicks. The NBA's glamour franchises in Los Angeles and New York. They don't have to be good, but they're at least supposed to be relevant.

The NBA needs that, right?

"I don't know, ask the league I guess what it means for them," Knicks coach Derek Fisher said. "It sounds like business is pretty good. The game is growing around the world. So I don't know if it's about a particular team or market having to do well if 400 million people in China are watching the game. I think all of that has changed and it's more about putting a good product on the floor."

There's not a person in either organization who would make an honest argument that the product on the Staples Center floor Thursday night was in any way good. Competitive is about the best either team can do on any given night.

"Some of it is that they're not talented enough to win a 48-minute game," Knicks president Phil Jackson said. "We understand that. But they can be competitive, and that's what we want to see."

Thursday night, both teams met that incredibly low standard. But that didn't make it a good basketball game. Honestly, the most entertaining moment of the night came when Jackson made his way down to the second row to sit next to his fiancée, Lakers president Jeanie Buss.

But mostly, as Fisher said very bluntly before the game, "if this game meant something then maybe there would be more emotion."

He's right. And that's exactly what is so disturbing about the situation. It literally doesn't resonate. It doesn't matter. Kobe Bryant, Phil Jackson, Jeanie Buss, Byron Scott, Kurt Rambis and Derek Fisher were all in the same building and there was absolutely no drama. No intrigue. Not much to talk about.

And if there's one thing people who live in Hollywood know, the time to worry about your career isn't when people give you bad reviews, it's when they stop reviewing you at all.

That's where the Lakers and Knicks find themselves at this moment. Down and out in lottery hell. And worst of all -- boring.

The big question for each isn't so much when they can get back on top, but how long it will take to become relevant again?

Jackson gave a window into his thinking Thursday morning when he said the Knicks don't have time to wait for whomever they draft this year to develop into a star. They need to rebuild through free agency -- stat.

"What we're trying to do is look at what advancement there can be in the short term," Jackson said. "How quickly we can recover and get back in the hunt."

Part of that sense of urgency is Jackson's own window. He's a 69-year-old former NBA player with the scar tissue to prove it. You get the sense that five-year contract he signed is the only one he'll really be able to fulfill. He can't sit around and wait three years for a lottery pick to blossom and resurrect the Knicks. He's got to do something of consequence this summer to turn things around appreciably. His health -- and his reputation -- can't take another year of this.

That reputation, the one built on 11 titles and Zen philosophies and wry smiles, is why the Knicks paid him $60 million to take over. It's why -- despite the Knicks' bad contracts and lack of assets to measurably change things -- there was a genuine curiosity about him in this new role. Maybe his star power was enough to attract free agents. Maybe he'd lead Carmelo Anthony on a guided meditation and unlock his talents the way he did with Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. Maybe his iconoclasm would translate into an edge for outsmarting the new collective bargaining agreement, which was mostly constructed to stop super teams in large markets like the Lakers, Knicks and Heat.

It's essentially the same exceptionalist thinking the Lakers and the Buss family count on when they look for reasons to believe in their future. That their cachet, the residual glitter from 30 years of dominance under their late father, Dr. Jerry Buss, still resonates and sets them apart.

Star power might fade a little, but it's usually more dormant than dead. Get some new highlights, hire a publicist, lose a little weight, take a great small role in a Miramax film that gets people talking again, and you're right back on top.

That's how it's always been for the Lakers and Knicks. That's the way it's been in the NBA, too. But is that the way things were, or how they still are?

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