NBA's latest attempt to pity the Knicks should make Celtics fans laugh

This had already been a bad week for Boston Celtics fans. They just watched their team’s five-game winning streak turn into a two-game skid after the Cs were forced into a mini break thanks to the Emirates NBA Cup.

It killed all of their momentum, and now, all of a sudden, they can’t make shots anymore.

As if the Cup couldn’t have made things any worse, New York Knicks fans are celebrating their first trophy since 1990. They won the McDonald’s Open by beating up on some European teams.

New York outlasted the San Antonio Spurs on Tuesday night, 124-113, which made them the NBA champions of December. The way the basketball world reacted was akin to the way a crowd goes wild when the high school team manager gets in the game and scores a basket on senior night.

Tuesday was a reminder of how heavily the NBA world pities the Knicks

There is no major sports organization that is universally pitied like the New York Knicks. Fans and media who couldn’t care less about the NBA Cup throughout this entire iteration, or in seasons past, were all of a sudden praising how much more these games mean to the players.

Their sad, pathetic fanbase is so starved for any sort of meaningful success that winning the rinky-dink Adam Silver invitational actually meant something to them. Sure, there are always people who are going to ironically celebrate online, but look at the genuine euphoria on the faces of Timothee Chalamet and Ben Stiller, two highly successful actors who have achieved nothing as sports fans.

Isn’t that sad? Aren’t they embarrassed??

The only reason we didn’t get hundreds of social media videos of starving Knicks fans celebrating in the streets of Manhattan last night is that they’re surprisingly smart enough to know that they would’ve frozen out there, like their envelope at the 1985 Draft Lottery.

That lottery played out in a similar way to Tuesday’s Cup final. It just sort of felt like the league wanted New York to win. Spurs head coach Mitch Johnson went two-for-two on challenges, both of which came in the fourth quarter. The first, however, didn’t bring back the three points the officials took off the board when they wrongly called a charge on the Spurs before a Justin Champagnie three found the bottom of the net.

Instead, Johnson was hit with a technical foul for arguing a call that the referees had messed up.

A few possessions later, they just ignored OG Anunoby’s foot being out of bounds as he secured a loose ball from the Knicks.

David Stern would’ve approved of the league’s work in Vegas, that’s for sure.

If you need any more evidence of what being a member of that sorrowful franchise in New York does to a person, look no further than Josh Hart. Hart, a collegiate national champion at Villanova, has clearly forgotten what it’s like to win. You can tell by whatever this was during the trophy presentation.

The trophy, by the way, is no comparison to a real Larry. This looks more like something five-year-olds are given after they complete their first season of youth soccer.

Now that I think of it, the Knicks and the NBA Cup are a match made in heaven. Both are meaningless, gimmicky, and manufactured money grabs. People will always try to tell you they’re important without any real evidence to back it up. “Oh, look at the colorful courts, it means more.” “Whoa, the Knicks play at ‘The Garden,’ what a special place!”

It’s all the same.

The only good thing to come out of this is that the Knicks apparently aren’t going to raise a banner for the only thing they’ve won in 50 years. As much as I would’ve loved to laugh at the fanfare that accompanied the potential ceremony, it’s nice to see the loser Knicks somehow high-road the Los Angeles Lakers, who raised a banner of their own when they won the inaugural cup two years ago.

Oh, and both previous cup winners, the Lakers and last year’s Milwaukee Bucks, were eliminated in the first round of the NBA Playoffs.

So, now I ask, Basketball Gods, what do you have for me?