One month ago, I was certain the New York Knicks had made an irrevocable mistake with the Mikal Bridges trade. It would be remembered as the deal that changed the landscape of NBA trades forever, and the tragic end to the Villanova Telenovela.
Buried in the sands of time, there exists an unpublished trade retrospective that I submitted the morning of April 25, also known as the day the Knicks began the most dominant stretch in NBA Playoff history. I do not believe in jinxes or karma or anything of the sort, but if I did… let’s just say this was suspicious timing. To quote from the lost files:
“The problem is that Bridges is basically the sixth or seventh most important player on the team, behind Brunson, Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby, Josh Hart and perhaps even Mitchell Robinson. He also makes $150 million to be a decent three-and-D wing, and cost all their draft capital — money and picks that could have been spent on a different player cough cough Giannis Antetokounmpo cough cough. Sure, the Knicks don’t actually need him to take 15 shots per game, but they’re paying him (and paid for him) to. Meanwhile, he’s pretty much putting up peak Bryce Sensabaugh numbers in 32 minutes instead of 23.”
None of that was wrong at the time. But Bridges, sensing a disturbance in the force, activated destroy mode and flipped every switch he had to propel New York Knicks to their first NBA Finals appearance since 1999. His play has been the difference between the faltering Knicks team that struggled with the Atlanta Hawks and the one that has not lost in a month. Sure, it would have been more embarrassing if we had actually gone through with publishing the piece, but I’m exposing its existence here and now so, erm, yeah.
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It’s worth noting that I wasn’t the only one who thought the Bridges trade was a disaster. He was benched in April, and his own teammates and coaching staff were having to defend his play publicly as recently as March. Stephen A. Smith was beefing with Josh Hart over it. Now? I am retrofitting a column that suddenly “became wrong” even though I mostly stand by the original points. Our take culture was not designed for situations like this, in which results dictate reality. It’s Schrödinger’s Bridges, who either is good or bad depending on an unknown outcome.
Bridges has indeed executed one of the great single-playoff turnarounds in NBA history. In New York’s most recent loss, a 109-108 contest in Game 3 versus Atlanta, Bridges scored zero points and notched a -26 plus/minus. It doesn’t get much worse than that. But his role increased after an OG Anunoby injury, and in New York’s subsequent 11-game winning streak Bridges is shooting over 60 percent from the field.
Does that expunge the multiple years of evidence I was drawing on to claim that the trade was bad for the Knicks and arguably not effective for the Nets? No, but I also failed to consider one of Brian Windhorst’s most well-known NBA truisms: Winning a title means never having to say you’re sorry. You pony up whatever it takes to get your guys because there is a chance they can be the difference between being good and being great. Whether the player you trade for is Kevin Durant or demon-time Trevor Ariza, if you win, that’s all there is to it.
Bridges has been terrible for chunks of his Knicks tenure, especially since New York traded a price that warranted the type of play one would expect from, if not a second scoring option, then at least for a 2A behind Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns. But this version of Bridges has been supremely adaptable, basically becoming the world’s greatest role player in their 11-game run. They never need him to create, but he can. They never need him to score, but he can. They don’t even need him to guard the other team’s best guy — OG Anunoby can handle that — but Bridges can. It took two years to manifest, but he has become exactly what the Knicks needed him to be; questioning his “worth” in retrospect now feels positively absurd.
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What will Bridges look like in the NBA Finals against much stouter defense than the Knicks have seen so far? Who knows, but I’ve certainly lost the right to concern myself with how much they gave up for someone who’s simply been a winning player on a championship-level team. The trade was still an overpay, but they’d probably do it again and throw in some cash considerations if they knew he’d be doing this in a Finals run so bright it burns the sky. You do what you have to do to win — right now, that meant trading whatever it took for Bridges.
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