The Knicks' Crowning, Hilarious, Wonderful Failure

There is an exercise you learn in clown college, or at least in graduate theater programs. These are the rules: the entire class is seated at one end of the room. A clown enters, walks to the center of the stage and has to make everyone burst into peals of uncontrollable, rollicking, so-bad-your-stomach-starts-to-ache laugher.

There's a catch. You can't do anything to try to make the audience laugh. No speaking at all, no pratfalls, no pulling faces. Nothing. Any conscious, overt attempt in any way, shape or form to coax even a giggle, and both you and your red nose are shuffled out the door to start the exercise all over again. It sounds impossible, but there is one way, and only one way, to succeed: you fail.

This will come naturally. You will just stand there, doing nothing and feeling awful, painfully aware of the sea of bored, judgmental not-laughing faces staring back at your catastrophically bad performance. And when you're at your absolute lowest, wishing that the earth itself would open up under your feet, even if it led to someplace worse—hell itself, law school, anywhere but this self-made prison—then and only then does everyone start guffawing.

Why? Because there's nothing funnier than a naked, raw, flopsweat-soaked pile of human suffering. This isn't sadism; the humor is in the profound and empathetic realization that we are all, in some way, this. It's a laugh of recognition. You can't fake failure, either, and you can't rush it. But when it works, it's more than hilarious—it's revelatory, even beautiful.

Which brings us to the New York Knicks. On Monday, near the end of a long, grim joke of a season, they failed in a new way, failed hilariously and gloriously, by succeeding. They played a scrappy and inspiring brand of ball, knocking off the 60-win, kind-of-phoning-it-in Atlanta Hawks, 112-108. The victory left them one game behind the equally tank-tastic Minnesota Timberwolves in this year's race to the bottom, and that much less likely to get the NBA Draft lottery's biggest prize.

All of a sudden, a 25% shot at landing the first pick and a guaranteed top-four selection is likely down to 19.9% (at best); there is a 12.3% chance they'll fall as far as fifth. It gets worse. If the Knicks bump off the Pistons on Wednesday and Sam Hinkie's gang of pick-hoarders lose to the still-mathematically-alive Heat, depending on a flip of Harvey Dent's coin, the Knicks could wind up a 30.5% chance of picking either fifth or sixth in what's generally considered a five-player draft.

The still-broken NBA lottery system practically demands that fans of flawed teams end up rooting for failure. It's logical, if also paradoxical and kind of un-fun. But it is at least a way of mitigating the pain of a disappointment that, for now, can't and won't change.

It's a layaway plan. There's never going to be an equal return, but if you do suffer through a season littered with failed trades, calamitous injuries and ill-conceived stratagems—if the failure is profound enough—there is the chance that the suffering will be repaid with some promise, in the form of a shiny new star player.

This deeply rationalized and actuarial worldview feels like a betrayal of all the rules of fandom, and goes against instincts hard-wired since childhood. I've spent months switching allegiances to whomever the Knicks were playing and pulling like mad for the injury-riddled, equally crappy Timberwolves and it all scans as uncomfortably adult in the worst sense of the word; either a sober weighing of sunk costs and best-case scenarios or a grim descent into cynicism that masks a total loss of hope. It's a drag.

Monday night, I found myself pouting like a colicky toddler about lost ping pong balls, and conspiratorially casting Tim Hardaway Jr.—who banged home treys and drove with aplomb during his 13-point first quarter—as the pawn in a nefarious, Manchurian Candidate-type long con by his Knick-hating dad. I groaned when Jason Smith, a walking jar of expired mayonnaise, unleashed his best bro-yawp after flipping in a stumbling, slapstick-y and-one that put the Knicks up 109-103 with 1:37 to go. I swore by all that is holy and good that Jeff Teague would rue the day he bricked a wide open bunny that would have knotted the score at 110 with three ticks left.

Basketball fans without a mangy, lost dog in this fight got the joke: at the one moment when the Knicks needed to lose, which is after all the thing that has seemed to come most naturally to them this season, they failed. They failed at failing.

This seems shameful, but really is more a point of pride. After the game, Derek Fisher talked about the unfunny paradox of trying to win while knowing that everyone outside their locker room would prefer they didn't. Maintaining the purity of a tank is not easily done, at least not without serious shenanigans. More importantly, as Fisher said, there is the question of pride. "[It] has no bearing on these guys' lives, and their careers, and their livelihoods, who we pick next year," Fisher said. "This is about them. And they went out and played that way."

Maybe this is the best way to see it. If it's not better, it is at least more human to look at this latest and strangest failure and smile at things like Langston Galloway's career night. However inconveniently timed, it also defied tanking's grinding, inescapable calculus.

It was, collectively, one hell of a failure from a team that has shown a mastery of the art. And, for all that, it was funny. We might as well laugh at this and all the lost seasons, not out of derision or scorn, but identification. Their failures are ours.