They booed him when he was drafted, thinking he wouldn’t be a star. They booed him — in raucous and sometimes ugly ways — when he came back as a member of the team he was traded to after he said he wanted to leave. The team barely protested, if at all.
Kristaps Porzingis, the former Knicks franchise cornerstone turned pariah, made his return to Madison Square Garden on Thursday night but in the uniform of Dallas, his new home after his shocking trade request last season sent him to the Mavericks. However, the game was almost an afterthought.
Knicks fans rained vitriol down on Porzingis from the moment he took the ball during the pregame layup line. As Syndee Winters, a Broadway performer, sang the national anthem, at least one Knicks fan audibly blared, “Go back to Latvia!” — Porzingis’s home country — while much of the arena was silent. Several others yelled “Traitor!”
“I don’t know if it’s fair or not,” Porzingis said after the game when asked whether he thought the boos were fair. “It’s what they know. It’s what they’ve heard. I don’t really think about that too much.”
He was asked again later and said: “It doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to win them over now.”
Fans can, of course, hold whatever grudges they want. But Knicks fans directing this much ire at their former star means letting a dysfunctional front office off the hook. Can anyone blame Porzingis for having misgivings about the team’s direction?
He played for two team presidents and three head coaches in three seasons — not including the current coach of the Knicks, David Fizdale, whom Porzingis didn’t play for because he was injured. He was made available for a trade by one of those presidents, Phil Jackson, early in his career just as he was becoming a star, while Joakim Noah, an injury-prone, declining center was offered a lucrative contract.
When a 19-year-old Porzingis was announced as the fourth overall pick for the Knicks in the 2015 draft, there were audible jeers inside Barclays Center. At least one young Knicks fan was caught on video being moved to tears. Porzingis, at a wiry 7-foot-3, was projected to take several years to develop.
Except he made an immediate impact his rookie year with an average of more than 14 points and 7 rebounds per game, making him one of the league’s top rookies and throwing aside any notion that he was a project. His numbers were better than those he had put up the previous year with Baloncesto Sevilla in the Liga ACB, the Spanish league with less-talented competition.
Porzingis quickly converted skeptical Knicks fans who suddenly saw him as a bright spot for a franchise often in the darkness. Kevin Durant referred to Porzingis as a “unicorn” because of his versatility. There was hope that pairing Porzingis with Carmelo Anthony — then a productive player still in his prime — might send the Knicks back to the playoffs. Porzingis made the All-Star team in his third season, but in February 2018, he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, temporarily derailing the promising start to his career.
Soon enough, his relationship with the franchise that drafted him also soured. Porzingis entered the league amid a new era of players realizing the leverage they had over teams, and Porzingis wanted to use his. In the telling of Steve Mills, the Knicks’ president, Porzingis didn’t believe in the future of the franchise. He was due for an extension soon and didn’t want one from the Knicks.
“When they came in to meet with us, they made it clear to us — it was a meeting that they requested — they made it clear to us that he did not want to play with the Knicks, that he was not going to re-sign with us as a free agent,” Mills, who replaced Jackson as president, said at the time, referring to Porzingis and his brother Janis, who is his agent.
Angry Knicks fans should also consider that it has never been established that the Knicks weren’t going to trade Porzingis anyway. The franchise has a history of this kind of thing. For his part, Porzingis suggested at the time that Mills’s version was not the whole story, sharing an image on Instagram that said, “The truth will come out.”
In many ways, Porzingis’s concerns have been justified. Last season, which he missed because of his injury, the Knicks finished 17-65, making them the worst team in the N.B.A. Over the summer, the Knicks didn’t sign any top free agents despite having maximum salary cap space after trading Porzingis. The assets they did obtain from the Mavericks in the Porzingis trade — DeAndre Jordan, Wesley Matthews, Dennis Smith Jr. and protected first-round draft picks — are either not with the team or are underwhelming, as in the case of Smith Jr.
Speculation about Fizdale’s job has run rampant since Mills and Scott Perry, the team’s general manager, unexpectedly held a news conference expressing dissatisfaction with the team’s direction following a Sunday loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers. If they miss the playoffs again, it will be for the seventh straight year, the franchise’s longest such run since the 1960s.
But misgivings go both ways. The Knicks didn’t exactly work hard to persuade Porzingis to stay, at which point they could have matched any offer for him as a restricted free agent over the summer. That they did not suggested that the Knicks weren’t as sold on him as the fan base was.
(Two months after he left for Dallas, he was accused of sexual assault, though the police have not filed charges and the N.B.A. has been investigating whether it was an extortion attempt.)
Instead, Porzingis now has to prove in Dallas that he’s worth the maximum contract extension the Mavericks gave him.
Even as was putting up stellar numbers in New York, there were injury concerns. He had missed at least 10 games in each of his first three seasons, and in Dallas he hasn’t shown yet that he is fully recovered from his A.C.L. injury. He’s averaging 18.5 points a game and 8.2 rebounds but at a career-low shooting efficiency. Against the Boston Celtics on Monday, Porzingis was benched for much of the fourth quarter after a poor shooting night.
The true consequences of the trade that sent Porzingis to Dallas likely won’t be known for several years. In the meantime, Porzingis does not seem to be holding any bitterness toward the Knicks. He was downright magnanimous about returning to his old home and the fans that greeted him with anger on Thursday night. At halftime, he even accidentally walked toward the home locker room before remembering he was now a visitor.
After the game, Porzingis called Knicks fans “really passionate” and played down the importance of the matchup. It was the Knicks’ third win of the season, and their second against Dallas. Playing for the first time in Madison Square Garden since February 2018, Porzingis struggled from the field but finished with 20 points and 11 rebounds. He had been taunted nearly every time he touched the ball.
“I love the city,” Porzingis said. “I miss it, and it was cool to be back here.”
Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
