The Endorsement: Rooting for Terrible Teams
Sure, the Knicks are in the Finals. But what if the suffering itself was the reward?
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I.
In June of 1999, five days after the New York Knicks lost to the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA Finals, they used the 15th pick of the first round of the NBA draft on a 7-foot-2 inch French center named Frederic Weis. This, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end; this was the first in a litany of absurdities that would play out over the next 27 years like a Univision soap opera. Weis would get ferociously dunked upon by Vince Carter at the Olympics, and never actually played a single game in the NBA, and the Knicks were on their way, burrowing hard into the flaming dumpster of the James Dolan era.
The following year, the Knicks would trade an aging Patrick Ewing, and then they would give a ridiculous contract to a guard with bad knees, and then they would blunder through an era where Isiah Thomas signed every stray free agent who wasn’t nailed down, and then they would blow holes in the reputations of Phil Jackson and Mike D’Antoni and Derek Fisher and a cast of thousands. It is remarkable to see all that idiocy compiled in one place, but Howard Beck and Katie Baker’s Ringer recap of 27 knuckleheaded Knicks decision of the era—one for each year of futility—is a truly remarkable compilation. “Year after year, for more than a quarter-century, the Knicks have been a dead end, a lost cause,” Beck and Baker write. “Whatever happens in the NBA Finals, it’s been a ridiculous road to get here.”
As noted previously in this space, I am not generally a fan of self-loathing New York sports teams, but I will admit that reading this article made me sympathize with the Knicks more than I had before. I will also admit that by the time I finished it, I felt a strange pang of jealousy for Knicks fans. Because I think the lesson of this ignominious chain of events is one that we are often reluctant to embrace. We expect our teams to be good; we expect them to live up to everything we want them to be. But so much of fandom—like life—is about enduring the suffering.
II.
On Monday night, the San Francisco Giants lost 16-2 to the Milwaukee Brewers. The Giants are not quite the worst team in baseball yet, but they are on the verge of fulfilling that promise. They cannot score runs consistently, they cannot pitch consistently, they cannot play defense consistently, they cannot steal bases consistently, and they cannot do anything consistently that resembles what you might call “good baseball.” It is an odd predicament, given that the Giants were expected to contend for a playoff spot this season, but it happens sometimes, and there is no good explanation as to why it’s happening, despite local talk radio’s desperate attempts to make sense of that which has no true cause.
The same thing could be said of the 2026 New York Mets; the same could be said of the 2026 Boston Red Sox. All are potentially good teams that are prolifically not good. Sometimes things go awry for no good reason, and there are two ways to react to this: The first is to get so consumed with anger that you abandon your own sense of humanity. And the second is to embrace the suck.
