Ornament Box Score Wrapping and the Return of the Knicks....

Incase you haven’t noticed, it’s that time of year again.  The colored lights are up, giant plastic snowmen and raindeer are cluttering up front yards and rooftops, and with each passing weekend the shopping centers are getting more and more unbearable.  But then, on the fun side, there’s putting up the tree!  That's always a good time right?  I have such fond memories of putting up the tree when I was a kid.

One of the reasons was because before we could unwrap the presents on Christmas day, we had to unwrap the ornaments to put them on the tree.  And in my family each year we would secure our ornaments, (some antique, some downright jankity... sorry Mom :) using that old standby… the newspaper.  (For those of you that don’t know, the newspaper was an artifact that used to be issued daily to individuals or families in order to communicate information complied from various news institutions… but truthfully, most people just read the comics.  Ah, whatever, look it up on Wikipedia.)

The great Walter Payton, always my favorite player.

Anyway, the point is, it seemed that somehow most of our ornaments were wrapped in... the sports section!  Oh, yes, that beautiful almanac of articles, rankings, standings, and box scores from historical sports’ seasons past.  It was indeed a secret pleasure of mine to see how long we could last with the same sports section from year to year.  In some cases many years survived.  Of course I put my own personal effort forth to keep the great 1985 Bears' and 1989 Cubs' seasons alive over the years, and it was always fun to re-live the amazing Michael Jordan Bulls' years from the 1990's too, through those crinkled layers of ornament padding.  (Those late-1980’s Bull’s box scores were quite a thrill.  The starting-five scoring was always something like: Jordan: 58, Pippen: 9, Grant 7, Cartwright 5, and Paxson 5.   No wonder they didn’t win championships until Mike started to share the ball.  Yikes.)

In 1991 Michael Jordan's Bulls finally won the championship,
beating Magic's Lakers in five games.

Just one more happy nostalgic element to the holidays, I guess, but for some reason looking at the standings in December is always a little bit warmer and cozier for me.  And box scores too!  Growing up overseas taught me to be a Box-Score-Guy.  Basically, if you couldn’t see the game, you could simply look at the box score in the newspaper and pretty much understand what happened.  Box scores for baseball and football games work quite a bit better than for basketball games though.  In baseball the stat is king; every situation is basically pitcher vs batter in a relatively consistent vacuum.  Football can be mapped out as a series of drives from a specific yard-line to the endzone.  Basketball, though… well, it’s kind of all over the place.  The basic stats: Points, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, and Blocks do tell a significant story of a game, but they can also be rather inconsequential or misleading.  For instance, getting 10 rebounds in a game is considered very good.  But you can miss a shot right at the basket, take four different tries to tip it back in, and end up with 2 points and 4 rebounds on one play.  You can knock the ball away from an opposing player, but it’s the guy who actually possesses the loose ball who is credited with the steal, so many of them are just lucked into.  And assists… well, some are kind of a matter of opinion.  There’s no stat for help defense, or the great pass before the assist, and a full court heave at the buzzer counts as a missed three-point shot.      

In other words, it’s a team game, and unless you watch every minute, you won’t really know which players are the most valuable to your team.  There are intangibles that players contribute on the court that cannot be measured statistically.  Still though, much of each game can ring true through a good old fashioned box score, and as luck would have it this holiday season, the Knicks have been on a TEAR!  (And that’s… TEAR as in, The Knicks are on an eight game winning streak for the first time since 2000, not… TEAR as in Knicks fans are Crying in their Beers again... as has pretty much been the story since that season ten years back.)  As previously mentioned on this blog, since moving to New York in that very same year 2000, I'd made the switch to Knickerbocker-backer, and have been thoroughly enjoying some long awaited Good basketball from this club.  And coach D’Antoni’s up-tempo offense can provide us with some dynamite box scores too!  Like take this first one from a recent 129-125 win against Denver at MSG.  (Click on it to make it bigger.)    

First of all you can tell that Coach D’Antoni plays his starters almost constantly, and secondly, each of the six guys that played at least 20 minutes, scored at least 13 points.  That shows incredibly balanced scoring and means that the Knicks are moving the ball well.  Raymond Felton’s 17 assists and the rookie, Landry Fields’ 7-11 shooting clip from the field along with 9 rebounds also jump off the page as quite impressive.  Of course Amar’e Stoudemire and Wilson Chandler putting up 30 and 27 points respectively, is nothing to sneeze at either (as my dad would say.)  This is simply a beautiful box score for a Knicks fan!

This second box score is a little less satisfying, since the mighty Celtics came into the Garden this past friday and ended the Knicks winning streak, beating them 118-116.  (Again, click to enlarge.)

While sill a rather beautiful box score, what it doesn’t tell you is that Amar’e Stoudemire hit a potentially game winning three-point bucket at the buzzer that was eventually waived off by the refs because he didn’t get the shot off in time.  I was able to watch the fourth quarter of this game, sadly only my second Knicks game of the season, and it was reeeeaally close… but they got it right… Amar'e didn’t get it off in time.  As much as Spike Lee tried to convince the refs that he did :)  Either way, it was still the best quarter of Knicks basketball that I've ever seen.

What this box score does tell us is that the Knicks are still playing wonderfully fluid offensive basketball, particularly Felton and Stoudemire.  Wilson Chandler is performing extremely well as a third option, and Landry Fields is still giving the team valuable intangibles (because otherwise D’Antoni wouldn’t have played him for 36 minutes with only 6 points and 6 rebounds,) and in spite of the loss, the Knicks showing that they can hang with a proven championship contender is a brilliantly heart-warming sign for their fans.  Of course, this box score could also prove quite historic during future ornament-unwrapping-tree-putting-up-sessions.  The Celtics have four FIRST BALLOT Hall of Famers on their team at the same time, and that doesn’t include Rajon Rondo, who is arguably their best player.  By the time his career is over he may be HOF material too.  Amazing.

So the plot thickens in the NBA East, Atlantic Division.  Boston is still the run-a-way favorite to win it, but the New York Knickerbockers for the first time in years are putting up a fight as their solid second place rival.  Happy days are here again for Knicks fans!  It’s been a looooooong time.  And even though these box scores from espn.com are of the digital variety and will be of little use to the ornament wrappers of the world, it is comforting to remember their physical counterparts, and the ways in which we used them in simpler times.  Maybe I'll print these up to wrap the ornaments this year, just for old times sake.        

Happy Holidays everyone… And happy ornament unwrapping.  Which year is your sports section from?  :)

Underdogs out.