Real Recognize Real: Money Mike's Knicks' Season Preview

The NBA tips off very soon; and I figured it was time to request help to write the season preview of my beloved Knicks. I enlisted my good friend and fellow superpower, "Money" Mike Benjamin to give a New Yorker's respective on the team that calls MSG home. Peep his thoughts after the random picture...

Fearless Forecaster: Knicks’ Preview 2009

When I close my eyes and think about the 2009 New York Knicks, my mind instantaneously flashes forward to the summer of 2010. You can’t blame me for this. It’s natural. For 95% of the Knick fan base, the key to our basketball ascendance rests squarely in the palms of one Joseph Donald Walsh Jr. and the (fading?) mythos of the World’s Most Famous Arena. Our legitimacy in the eyes of the basketball conglomerate depends on this. We’ve been brainwashed to think and speak in the future perfect tense.

So, why should YOU care about the New York Knicks of 2009? Why even bother to research the disparaging backgrounds of these symbiotic placeholders (Larry Hughes, Darko Milicic)? Should we even care to cheer these athletic mercenaries employed to coerce the distant superstar?

Yes, we should. We must motivate the Jared and Eddy, the two players impeding our efforts to scoop two megalomaniacs in the great tussle in 2010. We must embrace the youth movement, the only pieces of our disjointed puzzle alluring to the potential free agents of the next decade. I just don’t see Lebron riding straightway to N.Y. on his steed if our Knicks team remains pathetic, no matter how legendary the setting. (Unless we witness a swipe akin to the great steal of Wayne Gretsky by the Los Angeles Kings, which would indelibly lead to jeers of “Collusion!”)

Cheering for this impotent franchise doesn’t have to be a boring exercise, however. Within the first four weeks, a symphony of Knicks fans will be singing the praises of the lyrically notable Toney Douglas. Douglas, with his explosiveness and inventiveness similar to the reckless abandon of Nate Robinson, will sadly become the cheaper alternative to our Slam Dunk King when the free agent fracas ensues. David will shift from underrated, to overrated, to properly rated by season’s end, and probably receive a ransom not unlike a certain burgeoning forward (LaMarcus Aldridge) directly following our successful signing of Lebron, Wade, or some other member of the future NBA generation. And if the overrated Knicks management (yes, I said it…he hasn’t done jack since hiring Mike DiAntoni) can flip one of our uglier pieces of furniture for a state-of-the-art masterpiece (a first-round 2010 draft pick), we’ll be cheering simultaneously for John Wall AND the aforementioned 2010 piece de jour.

I’m penciling 60-22 as our record with my heart, but 33-49 with my brain. An astoundingly unimpressive amount of wins for an insignificant cast of characters. We’ll have much to cheer about, that’s for sure. Even if most of it is surrounding the events that will take place on July 1, 2010.

246 days, 14 hours, 57 minutes…and counting.

Mike Benjamin, II