Game Preview: Knicks vs Mavs, 11/14/2019

Here we are again, sitting at the NBA’s knee, preparing to get molested by the priestly national media. Level headed Knick fans didn’t expect a huge chain reaction of bountiful successes because the team signed competent role players to short term contracts. Yet here we sit, painted as the green and pink emblems of sheer stupidity, despite a collective lack of rah rah.

Tonight’s game will be broadcast on TNT because they know drama is a fantastic vehicle for the commercials they want you to see on the insides of your eyelids. Their main goal is to have you singing the braindead jingle as you walk from your cubicle to the gray meeting room. Puke out the blunt edged phrases you hear from the pissed on sores of television’s perfectly lit studios. Eat from their hand, and gurgle it back onto the laps of uninterested coworkers who like to play the radio but dislike music.

We all know Julius Randle should be coming off the bench but David Fizdale doesn’t have enough dog in his bones to get that right. A second unit wrecking ball is a fantastic piece of the puzzle to winning basketball games and much of Randle’s career successes have come in just such a role. The prestige of starting is a tawdry, sparkling hood ornament on your oxidized row boat, drifting hopelessly. Your sun chapped face is salt baked onto the one paddle existence of an embarrassing fandom. And you’re probably drunk!

Projected Starters

Mitchell Robinson is listed as questionable, still in the concussion protocol. It would be nice to get him back, but of course, Fizdale will pull him from the floor as soon as he is unable to spin into three defenders and promptly turn the ball over. More Dennis Smith Jr. time is to be expected, hopefully he’ll have a little more stamina this go round. That way Fizdale can play him 30-ish minutes and keep Frank Ntilikina on the bench, where his unwillingness to hijack the offense will go unnoticed.

Key Matchups & Predictions

• Whats his name will make his annoying return to the Garden. He stinks. Crying Knicks kid was right, a false emotional red zone crisis actor, but intially he was right.
• David Fizdale will be characterized in all the rags as a part of what makes the Knicks good, the culture he brings. Even though they are in fact not good and Fizdale does very little toward effecting positive change and only the most minimal cultural evolution.
• One tiny piece of the Fizdale-to-be-imminently-fired band aid will be pulled just askance.
• Frank Ntilikina will play less than 15 minutes.
• RJ Barrett will have a huge physical advantage over his matchup but the Fizdale will float him in the corner and ask Julius Randle to do all the playmaking.
• Luka Doncic will get the switches he wants and will score fifty points.
• It will be too complicated for casuals and randoms to understand that it has nothing to do with the Knicks signing a bunch of power forwards, but everything to do with the hopeless coach playing them three at a time. This person extolls the virtue of positionless basketball yet somehow has come to understand this revolutionary concept in the inverse of what it implies.
• Read that last bullet a fucking gain.
• Knicks by -27.

Warm Up Music