Team Dreams 2K19: Municipalize the New York Knicks

Whose team? OUR TEAM!

The New York Knicks, the outpost of America’s most popular sport in America’s biggest city, hardly live up to that promise of greatness. I propose that can change.

Though New York City is a powerful city—Wall Street, media capital, all that—its people don’t really have that much power. Not only does an ossified but slick machine control much of local politics, but the city itself doesn’t actually have full sovereignty. For reasons stemming from the fiscal crisis in the 1970s, New York City has to run a lot of its policies by the New York state government. For example, it can’t set its own rent laws. It can’t tax the rich (something our mayor, Warren “Bill de Blasio” Wilhelm, ran on to get elected in 2013). It also does not control the MTA, the largest transit system in the country, which runs the city’s subways and commuter rail. What if New York City’s dysfunctional institutions would function better under municipal home rule, free of meddling from an overlord who hates our guts?

And what if this was also true of the Knicks? Local celebrity Desus Nice recently proposed on his podcast, Bodega Boys, that the Knicks come under public control. The people of this city—long frustrated by the Knicks’ evil management—could vote on trades. They could democratically elect coaches and GMs. Maybe one blessed thing in this stratified city could be subject to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

After all, it’s not like the Knicks aren’t used to being publicly owned.

Forecast: a lot of strong performances that fall apart and they lose by 5 points