It’s Thanksgiving, so I’m supposed to do to the cheesy “Players I’m Thankful For” post, and believe me, I could – I’m the dude who drafted Deron Williams, Zach Randolph and Kevin Martin in rounds 6, 7 and 8. (Yes, I’m bragging, but I’m also trying to make myself feel better for what’s about to come.) Instead, I’m going to go the other way and let it fly.
Stephon Marbury. I hate you. I don’t love to hate you. I just hate you. You are terrible. For the next five months, you are going to bring at least a little bit of misery into every day of my life. You made me happy last night only because I had you on my bench. I thought to myself, “Well, Steve Francis is probably going to head to the bench, maybe he’ll have better luck with Jamal Crawford, maybe he’ll be motivated against his former team.” But I thought better of it. He started the game off driving to the hoop for a layup and I thought I might regret my decision. The rest of his first quarter action consisted of three missed shots and four turnovers. The fact that his final line – 18/1/3, 7-of-15, 4-of-15, no 3s, steals or blocks, 5 turnovers – qualifies as a step in the right direction says it all.
I’m especially upset because I shouldn’t have let this happen. I was very high on Marbury’s chances of turning it around after last year’s disaster. Larry Brown was gone, Isiah Thomas was in. Thomas needed Marbury and Marbury needed Thomas. Marbury had been one of the most consistent performers in the league in the past decade, and last year he was both injured and held hostage by Larry Brown. He even had a new shoe – the $15 sneaker – that he was trying to sell. And hey, when your sneaker only costs $15, you better sell a whole shitload of them, right? Eh, what do I know, I slept through most of my one economics class, when I even went. Point being, I expected big things, but if you remember this post the day before my draft, I basically placed Marbury on my team before the draft even started. And that was just foolish. I hate targeting players; you have to see how the draft plays out and get the value that presents itself. But I pretty much settled on Marbury and when my pick came up in the 4th round, I grabbed him. One of my favorite players, Jason Terry, went two picks later at #47. Terry is always undervalued, and would have been a fine pick there. But my mind was made up. Learn from my mistake.
I’ve watched a lot of Knicks ball so far this year – as much as I’ve been able to stomach, at least – in an attempt to diagnose Marbury’s problems. One of our wisest commenters, Bublitchki, offered his thoughts in the comments section of BV’s Warriors post on Tuesday, and I don’t think he’s far off. I’m not sure I buy as much into the Bill Walton-esque psychoanalysis that Marbury is a broken man and that he can’t restore his confidence. I do think it’s clear that he’s lost the swagger that he used to have, that he didn’t really earn, honestly. And it’s also fairly clear that Marbury does not approach the game the same way he once did. The slashing and tenacity aren’t there. He brings the ball upcourt, and if he doesn’t take it to the rack immediately, he passes it off and knows it’s not coming back to him. Because let’s face it, it would be hard to put a team together with fewer people who are interested in passing than what Isiah Thomas has cobbled together up in New York. Channing Frye, Eddy Curry, Jamal Crawford, Nate Robinson, Quentin Richardson – chuckers, everyone of them. So what happens is Marbury comes up court, passes it off and runs to the corner, uninterested, like Randy Moss breaking the huddle on an off tackle run.
So can it get better? Well, yeah, of course it can get better. And because of that, it’s going to be tough to do anything with Marbury. Unless you play in a ridiculously shallow league, you can’t think about cutting Marbury. He’s still a proven commodity who’s getting 35 mpg, cutting him out of frustration won’t really solve anything. His trade value is basically non-existent. For all the talk about buying low and selling high, there aren’t many people out there who actually have the balls to buy low, especially as low as Marbury is right now. The switch to Crawford doesn’t seem like a cure-all tonic. The Knicks are down to 4-9, and it might be getting to desperation time for Isiah. We could be getting to a point like last year, when there wasn’t a single Knick that was a safe play. As it stands now, only Jamal Crawford really is anyway. It seems unlikely the Knicks could have any sort of real success without Marbury, but the Knicks have certainly been playing worse with him on the court. Not much to do except slot him into your “slumper” bench slot that BV talked about yesterday. And maybe buy his shoes as gifts for everyone you know for Christmas, Hanukkah or Festivus, to inspire him.