NEW YORK -- With the Knicks perennially stuck in a tar pit of disappointment -- the more they thrash, the worse it seems to get -- it sounds strange to say the team's latest great rebuilding plan hinges on it getting another Amar'e Stoudemire.
Yet it does. Not the Stoudemire who got hurt and aged out during his stay with the Knicks, but the man who was willing to take the leap here when no other free-agent All-Star would.
It's a topic especially worth revisiting today as Kevin Durant's Oklahoma City Thunder arrive to play the Knicks at Madison Square Garden (without Durant, who will miss his second straight game with a sprained toe). The five-year, $100 million deal Stoudemire signed expires this season. Yet the Knicks are right back where they were when they were angling to get LeBron James, Chris Bosh or Dwyane Wade and wound up with Stoudemire instead.
Durant, supposedly the Knicks' latest target, can easily get the sort of max contract the Knicks threw at Stoudemire if Durant opts for free agency in the summer of 2016. Stoudemire couldn't say the same in 2010.
The point is that the Knicks again desperately need someone who can see past how dreadful the team is now and has the guts to believe it would turn around if he was added to the mix. That's what Stoudemire did.
Durant or Kevin Love would have to turn down earning more money where he is, and the chance to play with better players, to come to New York. In September, the Knicks even resorted to an old tactic of theirs -- the Hire-A-Superstar's-Pal program -- when they chose head coach Derek Fisher, a former Oklahoma City teammate of Durant's, and assistant coach Brian Keefe for their current staff. So what if it didn't work with Mike D'Antoni and LeBron?
"[Keefe is] Durant's guy," the New York Post reported, detailing how Durant credited him for leaning on him to improve his attitude and on-court body language.
Knicks owner/sometime bluesman James Dolan probably dropped his harmonica for joy when he read how Durant endorsed Fisher as a head coach in May: "He's a smart guy, smart mind. He's a great motivator, great speaker and can really relate to a lot of guys and demands that respect from everybody. He's a great locker room guy. I'm sure he'll do a great job."
Then again, Dolan might have been tempted to scream when recent reports surfaced that Durant might be interested in going home too. For him, that's Washington, D.C., where he could play with a better Wizards team led by All-Star point guard John Wall.
It's become sort of fashionable to mock Stoudemire for what didn't happen after he arrived.
And some of it is unfair.
Stoudemire was seriously mentioned in MVP talk after he arrived in town announcing, "The Knicks are back!" At the time, Stoudemire's enthusiasm about getting his first chance to be "the man" after spending so long in Steve Nash's shadow in Phoenix felt almost sweetly naive. You wanted someone to quietly pull him aside and say, "Pump the brakes, pal. I know you're new around here, but don't you know the Knicks are a franchise where careers go to die?"
You probably know the rest: Stoudemire played well at first. Then he broke down. Before long, the Knicks fired D'Antoni, shoved out Donnie Walsh, never explained why they dumped Glen Grunwald and fired Mike Woodson not long after a 54-win season. Phil Jackson came along as team president but disparaged former NBA Defensive Player of the Year Tyson Chandler before shipping him back to Dallas, and he sent former Knicks Sixth Man of the Year J.R. Smith to Cleveland along with Iman Shumpert, who never developed in New York.
Along the way, we also learned that Stoudemire made a pilgrimage to Israel to study Kabbalah and his Jewish heritage on his mother's side, he's apt to punch a fire extinguisher when he's upset about losing a playoff game (wow, remember the playoffs?), and he likes to take "therapeutic" red-wine baths for his aching bones.
(Wouldn't drinking the red wine be even more therapeutic? The eight-win Knicks are that bad.)
But nobody has ever accused Stoudemire of dogging it, faking his aches or not giving a damn, no matter how much he's been maligned.
"Amar'e's been great to work with, a professional in the truest sense of the word," Fisher said a little over a week ago. "I don't know any guy in the league -- Kobe [Bryant] comes to mind -- considering the history Amar'e has with his knees, all the surgeries, all the work he had to do just to play, it says a lot about who he is.
"You want guys on your team like that."
If you want to blame anyone for what Stoudemire's signing did not bring, don't slam Stoudemire. Blame the Knicks for overpaying him. Or blame Steve Kerr for being demonstrably smarter than the Knicks not once, but twice.
First, when Kerr was the Suns general manager, he let Stoudemire walk out of Phoenix rather than pay max money because the Suns projected Stoudemire wouldn't hold up physically for the life of the contract. And they were right.
Then Kerr turned down the Knicks' head-coaching job last summer, correctly seeing what his mentor Jackson admittedly didn't see: The Knicks were far worse than Jackson understood.
Now look, Kerr, who took the Golden State job instead, will be back at the Garden in a couple of weeks coaching the West in the NBA All-Star Game because the Warriors easily have the conference's best record -- yet another lovely reminder of something that didn't happen for the Knicks.
The only way Stoudemire will sniff that game will be in street clothes.
His All-Star days are long gone. Soon, his Knicks' stay will probably be over as well.
But for as long as he's in New York, the Knicks should use Stoudemire as an emissary, rather than ask only Anthony to recruit Durant to come to New York or ask only Anthony to be the good company man and spend one of the Knicks' rare off-days at the Garden with Jackson and the team's front-office staff so he could "accidentally" bump into Duke's Jahlil Okafor, the projected No. 1 pick in the draft, outside the locker room when the Blue Devils were at the Garden last week to play St. John's.
Stoudemire could tell Durant what it took for him to look at this place where careers go to die and say the hell with it -- I want to be the guy who will someday be able to say, "The Knicks are back, the Knicks are back."