When we first had New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author David Grann on the podcast back in 2023, Drew and I mostly asked him the sort of things that we would ask one of our heroes when he happened to be out there promoting a new book. We had a good conversation about that book and his process as a writer, but the real surprise of the episode came at the end, when Grann revealed that he was a true sicko of a Knicks fan. It's one thing to talk to one of your favorite writers about writing, and quite another to talk to that writer about Eddie Lee Wilkins. We made a note that we'd have him back on someday to spend a whole episode talking about the Knicks, at some point when they were playing well enough to warrant a whole episode of their own. Well, about that:
"The world is shit," the author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z said early in our interview, "but the Knicks are great." We focused mostly on the last part of that, and much of the episode is given over to a somewhat giddy discussion of whether one of the NBA's most reliably tragicomic franchises really has figured something out, and whether they actually have a shot against whichever juggernaut escapes the Western Conference Finals. Grann does know ball, but he also knows the Knicks well enough to know that this moment of cheering for a juiceful and flourishing team is a pretty severe outlier.
While we touched on plenty of the nuts and bolts—how much credit Tom Thibodeau deserves for the success of the team his replacement seems to have unlocked, Mike Brown's season-long experimentation with the team's rotation, the Landry Shamet Experience and the resurrection of Mikal Bridges—it keeps coming back to how shockingly well all of this is working at this moment, and how easy the Knicks have made it to believe that they really could win it all. As I mentioned right before the break, the overall vibe is like if you interviewed Wile E. Coyote in the moments after he'd raced off the edge of a cliff but before he'd looked down and ruined it all.
When we returned, Drew tried his best to get Grann to answer some tough questions about the team, and also some silly questions about James Dolan and the Knicks' celebrity-row regulars. This is how we came to game-plan strategies for evading Dolan's facial recognition technology, and how I came to explain Fat Joe to literally David Grann, and where Drew and I spoke our truth about Spike Lee's tendency to over-accessorize. Drew compared him to a Let's Make a Deal contestant; I took a moment to shout out Inside Man, which is one of my favorite things to do.
To the extent that we were able to get Grann off his cloud at all, it was only briefly. This is a man who is living his dream as a fan, and the giddiness of that came through nicely on the pod; Grann was on a date with his now-wife at the Larry Johnson four-point play game, and has watched many bad teams since. It is hard to begrudge him his delight. "I've been in bars with louts," he said at one point, explaining his years in the fan wilderness, and now here he was on our dumb podcast, dipping into the Funbag and celebrating Tyler Kolek. Surely this wasn't the most dreamlike aspect of his last month, but it was pretty far up there for me.
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