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On Jan. 5, 2015, the Knicks lost their 12th game in a row, to the Memphis Grizzlies, 105-83. New York was 5-32, tied for the worst record in the league. That night, the team had agreed to trade away two of its best players in a deal that went up like a white flag over the season.
Scott Cacciola, then the Knicks beat writer for The New York Times, reported the trade, but also wrote about the Knicks’ performance in Memphis:
“Futility was the preferred replacement for fluidity, surfacing in plays defined by an almost inexplicable level of ineptitude,” Mr. Cacciola wrote.
Those were the last words he would write about the Knicks for a while.
Four days later, The Times instead published an article by Mr. Cacciola about the Emporia State (Kan.) Lady Hornets, the top-ranked team in the Division II women’s college game. It was the first article in a series called Not the Knicks, a long, winding road trip Mr. Cacciola took in search of well-played basketball. The Knicks were so bad he would not find it at their games, unless describing the other team.
Today, with the Knicks one win from a championship, the futility of the 2014-15 season may be hard for young fans to imagine. But older fans remember that year, and others like it, in the team’s 53-year title drought.
This week, Times Insider caught up with the journalists on the Sports desk 11 years ago who made Not the Knicks happen. Interviews with them have been edited and condensed.
What was the thinking when you started Not the Knicks?
JASON STALLMAN, Sports editor: The Knicks were awful and there was massive fan discontent. Around Jan. 5, they all but announced they were giving up on the season. They traded J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert, and the team president, Phil Jackson, basically said they were working on the draft at that point. This is still an issue the N.B.A. struggles with; teams give up on the season and start playing for the draft.
We thought, if they’re giving up on the season, why do we have to go to every game? How would our resources be better spent? The idea that Scott should take a break from the team came from Ben Dolnick, the brother of Sam Dolnick, a former deputy on the Sports desk. Sam passed it on to me and we ran with it. We were enamored of this idea of finding good basketball, wherever it might be.
SCOTT CACCIOLA, Knicks beat reporter: This was back when we were writing running game stories, which meant filing your article at the buzzer and revising the story for the next day’s paper. Covering the Knicks was like “Groundhog Day.” It was very difficult to come up with new and inventive ways to write about another loss in a string of them.
Jason emailed me and said something like, How would you like to take a break from covering this miserable team? I was like, sign me up. I didn’t even know what he was talking about.
JAY SCHREIBER, deputy sports editor: The only hesitation that I might have had was, were we mocking Phil Jackson and the team? But the season was so terrible. You thought about that for a second, then you said, OK, let’s do it.
But then we had to find stories. It would have been boring to just write about other N.B.A. teams. We were taking pride in coming up with offbeat ideas.
You published a callout asking readers to nominate good teams at any level. Why did you choose that route, and how did their suggestions shape the series?
STALLMAN: At first we thought, let’s unshackle Scott and send him wherever. But then we said, Let’s crowdsource the idea. That’s how we ended up with people saying, You should come check out this team.
CACCIOLA: We never would have known about the Central Illinois Xpress, a team of girls dominating a fifth-grade boys’ league; or the sisters from Mexico who were leading a high school team in Texas; or the running pickup game at the Y.M.C.A. on 14th Street that started in the 1970s, without the reader callout.
What traits did you want Not the Knicks articles to have?
STALLMAN: We wanted the overall mix to be eclectic. We didn’t want to do all youth basketball or all domestic teams. We wanted them to be surprising. One week, Scott was with the Harlem Globetrotters. Next, he was with a youth girls’ team. Then he was in New Zealand to follow a team in the Australian Basketball League.
The small illustrated icon attached to the series got people’s attention.
CACCIOLA: After I wrote the first story from Kansas, we broke out the Knicks logo inside a No Smoking sign. That’s when we got a lot of attention. There was some confusion because some readers thought we had abandoned the Knicks completely. We didn’t; we were still sending stringers to games.
WAYNE KAMIDOI, Sports art director: In Sports design at the time, running logos of teams was a good point of entry for readers. The circle with the red line wasn’t the most elegant, but it signaled what the series was going to be.
JAY SCHREIBER, deputy sports editor: That logo immediately told everybody what we were doing. We were off and running.
The name of the series told people what you weren’t going to cover. That’s not how journalists typically explain their work. Did you receive any blowback?
STALLMAN: It wasn’t that hard of a sell. It’s difficult to imagine, considering where we are now in this Knicks season, with the entire city galvanized by their success — but it was truly the opposite at the time. The name of the series was a little cheeky and maybe a little aggressive journalistically. But the vast majority of people were on board. The response from readers was supportive.
CACCIOLA: Any sort of brushback I got was from longtime fans or traditionalists of beat writing. It came at a time when beat coverage itself was evolving, especially for newspapers. We were trying to figure out the most effective way to cover a team when there’s so much information available online. I think it signaled that we were a section that was going to do things differently. We weren’t trying to please everybody.
The post For a Knicks Reporter, Good Basketball Wasn’t Always So Easy to Find appeared first on New York Times.
