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Isiah and Steph: What happened?
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Isiah and Steph, what happened?
Theirs was a destiny fused right from the beginning. One fortified by a bond where profits and proceeds stood to far exceed any typically reserved for such pacts as legend and protégé, coach and player, mentor and pupil.
Yet in the end, the deal between Isiah Thomas and Stephon Marbury held all the valued usefulness of an unmonitored stock portifolio idly left along a Wall Street trading floor. For just a few seasons after the equal parts investment of the NBA legend and hometown prodigy with the skills-to-pay-the-bills, one now hides in forced excile while the other desperately seeks to escape public purgatary.
And just how can that be? By their very nature, the elements that make each a once in a lifetime point guard God, Steph and Zeke would seem preordained for a meeting of the minds. Seem destined to speak the same language, share the same vibe.
Ever the prophet, Isiah was convinced he understood Starbury. And with that understanding seemed to lie the rhyme and reason to the riddle of what has longed curse the Knicks. Makes one of the league’s proudest and most storied franchises such a target in the game of ridicule and derision.
“He’s won big-time in life already,” Thomas once said. “I tell him don’t accept the tag of being a loser because in the real game of life you’ve won big-time, considering where you started from in Coney Island.”
Indeed, though geographically thousands of miles from the rough and tumble West Side environs where he himself grew up in Chicago, Isiah always seemed to understand that he and Marbury essentially hailed from the same place.
“I was always an outsider, too,” he said. “It’s lonely at the top, Steph loves everyone but he’s been kicked around. Most superstars want to be in the group but sometimes it’s hard for them; who wants to be alone?”
But want and need are two distinct things. And Isiah would have been wise to share that learned distinction with his one time, ball-lovingdisciple. Their very survival here in NYC always seemed to hinge on the former’s ability to fully convert the latter into a less-is-more way of being, a we-are-one, card-carrying way of thinking.
If the Knicks were to ever improve during the reign of Zeke and Steph, Marbury needed to become the leader many had long concluded he could never be. It all started with a willingness to sacrifice his own merits, his Starbury alter-ego, so that all around him may grow and prosper more.
Isiah seemed the perfect man for the job. And he was convinced Steph was ready and willing to embrace the lessons he was willing to share. He was willing to bank his Hall of Fame, point guard God credentials on closing the deal. The question is what happened?
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