Araton: International Focus Is Still Foreign to Knicks

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November 7, 2006
Sports of The Times

International Focus Is Still Foreign to Knicks

By HARVEY ARATON

A noteworthy pattern emerges from the opening week of the Knicks’ 2006-7 season. And a characterization that not only contrasts them with opponents but helps sum up the state of professional basketball in cosmopolitan New York: downright unworldly.

Opening night, on the road, the Knicks narrowly beat a Memphis team without its one indispensable player, the Spaniard Pau Gasol.

In Atlanta, they couldn’t handle an unheralded center from the Republic of Georgia, Zaza Pachulia, who torched their soft interior for 22 points.

In their home debut, the Knicks trailed Indiana by a point going into the fourth quarter, but the Lithuanian guard Sarunas Jasikevicius scored 14 of his 16 points. They lost by 14.

To the Knicks’ credit, they didn’t quit last night after being down by 19 in the fourth quarter. But the Spurs, a team with five contributing foreign-born players orbiting their hub — Tim Duncan of the United States Virgin Islands — brushed them off for a 105-93 victory at Madison Square Garden.

China’s Yao Ming awaits the Knicks in Houston on Friday night, the Spurs again Saturday in San Antonio and, beyond that, more reminders of how a worldwide basketball revolution somehow happened without the franchise from America’s greatest melting pot.

The Knicks play in what New Yorkers have been conditioned to believe is the world’s most famous arena, but there are American cities, without intricate train lines tunneling underneath the building, that have more sophisticated basketball operations.

Deep in south Texas, the Spurs have won two championships since the French point guard Tony Parker and the Argentine pit bull Manu Ginóbili (they combined for 39 points and 17 assists last night, 5 more than the entire Knicks team) became the fruit of Coach Gregg Popovich’s longtime fascination with the international game. Dallas came close last season behind a German, Dirk Nowitzki.

Across the Hudson, in trendy East Rutherford, N.J., the Nets have a Serbian center, Nenad Krstic, whom they stole with the 24th pick of the 2002 draft and wouldn’t trade for any combination of Knicks. Utah may be one of the country’s most genous states, but the Jazz frontline features a Russian, Andrei Kirilenko, and a Turk, Mehmet Okur.

In sun-drenched, conservative Phoenix, Coach Mike D’Antoni brought his freewheeling offense and it became the N.B.A. rage, quarterbacked by a Canadian (Steve Nash), with a touch of France (Boris Diaw) and Brazil (Leandro Barbosa) on the wings. Bryan Colangelo, who hired D’Antoni away from the Italian team Benetton Treviso, became the front-office heavyweight in Toronto, brought in the respected Benetton executive Mauricio Gherardini as assistant general manager and sprinkled his roster with foreign-born flavor.

On and on the revolution reigns, except in rare places, Manhattan among them. Dozens of young men from afar have come to David Stern’s league of opportunity in the 21st century to realize their dreams while the Knicks have remained in an international scouting stupor, or sound asleep, having a recurring nightmare about Frédéric Weis.

Weis, a young French center, was the 15th pick of the N.B.A. draft in 1999 by the Knicks and was greeted with such skepticism and scorn when he arrived in New York for a summer rookie camp — the Knicks had passed on Ron Artest — that he went home, never to return.

As the Knicks general manager, Scott Layden dabbled in foreign currency, with a couple of second-round picks that amounted to nothing. Isiah Thomas’s reign has been marked by an insularity so thorough you have to wonder if it has been by design.

His one training camp invitee this fall was Nikoloz Tskitishvili, a Georgian who was selected fifth by Denver in the 2002 draft and failed to earn playing time on four teams in as many seasons.

While the rest of the league has been test-driving imports, Thomas has steadfastly purchased big American reputations and punitive bloated contracts. Is this dogged provincial strategy ultimately pragmatic? In the global economy, are they Knicks or are they hicks?

Forget Nowitzki, Yao or Gasol. Landing a great player is more often about the luck of the draft draw. But look around the league at how many useful players have come from abroad via the second round, or as veteran free agents. An Andres Nocioni (Chicago) here, a Beno Udrih (Spurs) there.

Could there not have been five big men in Europe — perhaps even Weis — who would have come to the Knicks much cheaper and been more useful than Jerome James?

This isn’t a call for diversity or quotas. If you have one of the blessed American-born stars — a Dwyane Wade, a LeBron James — you don’t worry about what’s in vogue. But as Popovich, an Air Force Academy graduate with a degree in Russian studies and a Serbo-Croatian family background, said of basketball without borders: “This is not a trend in the sense of furniture or fashion. It’s a fact. And those who don’t understand that are going to be left behind.”

Sound like any team we have been watching the past few years?

The more spirited post-Larry Brown Knicks say they want to play fast, just like Phoenix, but basketball is no track meet. The running game requires guards who rebound, who understand the game’s geometry and spacing, who make a living off ball and body movement more than the yo-yo dribble. The passing game requires a big man or two who can step out and hit the jump shot, the way it’s long been done in Europe.

This was becoming obvious as far back as six years ago, when the United States Olympians escaped the Sydney Olympics with a gold medal, their last in a worldwide compe ion.

“What we learn from them is what they learned from us,” Stern said in Sydney.

How can New York City, of all places, be among the last still living in the past?

E-mail: [email protected]

[YoMamaIsCallin]

I have two comments.

1) The writer is exactly right about so-called "small ball", which should really be called "playing fast", as he points out. Playing fast does not mean it's a track meet where superior athleticism wins every time. And it does not mean that you have small players. Lots of 7-footers can play "fast" and a lot of them don't come from the USA, where big kids are only taught to play inside.

2) Isiah Thomas is an arrogant, biased, clueless train wreck. The fact that he, alone among NBA GMs, still thinks non-American players are inferior, and still thinks in particular that players exactly like him (inner-city undersized players "with heart") are the only ones who belong on his team, is only one proof point. Another is his constant going-for-the-next-big-deal then discarding them like yesterday's newspaper. Look what he tried to do to Larry Brown, for example -- hiring him for a ridiculous amount, giving him no support and nothing to work with, then firing him and trying to screw him out of his contract money.

[Mr. Body]

Yeah, the Knicks are still waiting on Frederic Weis, Slavko Vranes, and Maciej Lampe to pan out.