Holds the NBA record for most games played shirtless with one. Image: source.
Wednesday may be David Lee's last game as a Knick. It's a strange circumstance when a one-time all-star, who's only been in the league for five years, and who never came very close to making the playoffs makes an emotional impact on a fan base, but Lee did.
Maybe this eulogy is premature, and it's definitely overly-sentimental. The guy who plays matador defense and who's never going to be the primary scorer on a winning team? This is the guy you want people to connect with? After all, Lee could be back in the blue and orange, and occasionally baby-poop green when the team needs to sell extra jerseys to Irish people, when the team starts playing again in the fall. But even if he's back, the situation will be very different. He won't be the number one guy anymore, unless Isaiah comes back and does terrible Isaiah things. Maybe the Knicks won't get Lebron or Wade, and maybe not even Bosh, but at the very least we're looking at Joe Johnson, Amar'e Stoudemire, Rudy Gay or something else entirely. Even if Donnie Walsh does a bad job in the free agent market, few doubt that the Knicks should be competing for at least a low playoff seed next year.
That should be a positive thing. The Knicks will be a playoff team for the first time since the early part of the last decade (no, Marbury's first year does not count when they lost to the Nets as the eighth seed). The fans will look to move forward and forget about Isaiah, Eddy Curry, Jerome James, Steve Francis, Penny Hardaway, Ronaldo Balkman and many others. Seeing Lee there won't feel right. He'll be rejuvenated like Paul Pierce once Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett jumped on board, probably just thrilled to be there. And really, I hope all that happens. I want the guy to be a winner, and I want him to be a winner as a Knick. I think he could adjust to being the third scoring option and big time offensive rebounder on a contender.
But still, it's the end of an era. If he's a winner, he doesn't stand for what David Lee used to stand for. He becomes a different guy to a fan base without changing himself in any way. After you made jokes about how you were stuck going to see Knicks-Clippers that night, talking about how awful Isaiah was and how fat Curry is, you talked seriously about how great it was that Lee seemed to be getting better by the game and how you appreciated that he hit the offensive glass and worked his ass off every night.
I don't want to say something dopey like suggesting he saved the fans from abandoning the team, because New Yorkers weren't ready to give up, they were just sick of losing. But he made going to the games a lot less embarrassing and gave fans something to cheer about.
He's the rare case where the token, occasionally goofy-looking white guy who you don't take seriously gets progressively better to the point where you see him filling up a stat sheet and ask, "Well when the hell did that happen?" Before last season, it was a serious conversation to talk about whether the Knicks should try to resign Nate Robinson or Lee. Then Robinson imploded and made Lee look like a lock by comparison, but Lee still improved to the point that for the first time he's the team's number one scorer, for better or for worse.
He's no hall of famer, and he's probably not even an all star, and I'm definitely not going to feed you the typical shit that we hear about a star energizing a city like Boston fans did Nomar and how the media talks about the Saints doing to New Orleans. Or, god forbid, how often he smiles and seems to enjoy himself. Just awful. It's not about any of that. David Lee is a good basketball player, and he made watching a terrible, terrible team a little easier to watch. So, whatever happens this summer, happens, but thanks for the slightly less shitty memories.
