I’m coming to this game twelve minutes into the first quarter.  I tried to tune in earlier, but each time I built up the psychic fortitude required to watch, my eyes filled with tears of rage and sudden-onset decrepitude, and within 3 or 4 seconds I’d have to throw a shoe at the TV’s ‘Off’ button and run screaming from the room in dubious horror while ripping the batteries from my remote.  It was sort of like when I was a small child and I kept trying to watch the Disney cartoon ‘Aladdin,’ but at every attempted viewing, I’d make it something like two minutes in, to the point in which the cartoon stone lion swallows a pair of cartoon gypsies, and I’d force my parents to obliterate the television screen before I destroyed our home’s peace with my shock-and-awe artillery of terrified howls.

Otherwise stated: Watching 27 real-time minutes of the Knicks play the 76ers was like reliving irrational childhood nightmares that had previously been locked dormant in heretofore heavily fortified portions of my psyche for decades.

Specifically:

1:03 1Q: Sixers announcers have used the actual phrase “I don’t know what kind of basketball player he was, but he was much better in other sports” three times in the first two possessions of my viewing to describe former 76ers players.  Not sure for which profession they’d suggest the current Sixers roster would be better suited, but I am imagining ‘Disgraced Homeless Former Hot Dog Truck Driver’ is in the Top 5.

:43.2 1Q: Nearly all the way through the First Quarter, and there are fewer total points in this game (35) than total games won by either team combined over the last twenty-seven years.  I am estimating this statistic based purely upon the abomination that I have witnessed over the last four minutes but I see no possible way that it could be inaccurate.

END 1Q: The 76ers broadcast is advertising a Twitter hashtag: #Sixerstalk.  I check it out and it is just an endless scroll of people writing “Blood Garbage” in between anguished seeming nonsense words that I am guessing is the result of many people reflexively vomiting onto their keyboards.

11:32 2Q: Every time the Knicks score (something like two times so far — enough to establish a pattern I am certain), the Sixers play-by-play guy has announced the scorer with the introduction “Ohhhhhhh, so that’s, uh, that’s–“.  Don’t worry buddy, the guys that the Knicks starters were playing with last week in the Thursday Night Modified Taco Stand Employee Junior D League didn’t know who they were, either.

9:23 2Q: The Sixers have run, two or three times so far, a weird offensive set that employs three successive screens at the top of the circle in which none of the screeners roll and the ball handler weaves flamboyantly through them and then inexplicably sprints out of bounds.  Surprisingly, this has seemed more effective than the Knicks offensive strategy, in which Carmelo tackles the ball at midcourt and lies splayed  on the floor, weeping, trying through garbled sobs to get the referees to listen to his business ideas.

7:38 2Q: “Carmelo Anthony is running around looking at everyone saying, ‘HEY, I’M CARMELO ANTHONY!”: direct quote, Sixers announcer.  I actually sort of wish this one was a joke.  I’m beginning to imagine the Sixers announcers as a pair of morose washed-up once-professionals, floating through their lives in a haze of shame and wasted promise and interacting exclusively in sad-sack Bill Murrayisms.  Also fighting the urge to write an enormous “Humans of New York” style sixty thousand word column about the sad masochistic freaks whose lives are so depressing and failed that they at some point veered down a path that led them to eventually right now in the present pay money to attend this game, complete with accompanying forlorn portraits of each patron and merciless scorched earth descriptive analyses of how exactly their lives went wrong and how the cherubic exuberance of their youth has been replaced by some distant unidentifiable series of motivating events by an overwhelming malaise and feeling of human existence as generally parasitic and meaningless.

7:05 2Q: “It’s nice to see the Sixers run some offensive plays and see them turn out the way they wanted.”  This is a hopeful assessment by the TV crew but it is not describing anything that has happened in this game so far.  Possibly they have abandoned the live action and are now reading aloud subtly pornographic 76er fan fiction.

5:59 2Q: The Knicks have missed something like 7 shots in a row, and have completely abandoned the idea of attempting an offensive rebound, and are instead wisely sprinting back into their defensive sets at the onset of every shot, cleverly anticipating each miss and allowing 4 Sixers players to converge on every inevitable rebound.  While the Sixers are happy to pad their rebounding stats, they have filed a petition with the league office to have the Knicks reprimanded for plagiarizing their offensive philosophy, “Assume That Every Shot Will Result in Failure.”

4:21 2Q: Carmelo, apparently gripped by some weird tantrum after not drawing a few fouls that the refs apparently did not hear him call on their behalf, has begun indiscriminately hurling elbows at everything that moves.  Please god let him just burn this building to the ground.

3:06 2Q: The game returns from commercial, and :36 seconds of game action has apparently transpired during the break.  I am not sure what the hell this network even is that I am watching this game on, but they are apparently doing their best to show us as much mercy as contractually allowed.

1:07 2Q; It seems as though I threw up at my television as an act of violence against it, passed out from confused exasperation, awoke to the sideline reporter advertising something called “Dollar Hot Dog Night,” vomited again.

:22.6 2Q: THERE IS AN EIGHT PERSON PILEUP UNDER THE KNICK BASELINE IS THIS AN ACT OF DIVINE SYMBOLISM I DON’T EVEN CARE WHY DOES THIS GAME EXIST.

:1.7 2Q: If you listen closely, you can hear the rim begging forgiveness for whatever it is every shooter in this game imagines it has done wrong.

:00 2Q: I can’t take it anymore.  I just can’t.  I was going to try to push through at least another quarter, even if it was simply to follow the character arc of the announcers as it plummeted screaming toward earth, but no level of intrigue for the train wrecks of complete strangers whose misery I might enjoy from afar is worth this.  I’m not sure how I feel about ‘tanking’ — whether I think as a strategy or phenomenon it really exists to the extent that it’s talked about in The Media, and if it is, whether I agree in theory with its strategic employ or whether it should be regulated out of the league for moral impropriety — but I know that, stripped down and viewed in the basest terms, as a person who loves basketball, wanting to watch a basketball game that reflects and respects The Game in even a remote, superficial way, the product being put out by these two teams is a dumpster-fire disaster that I don’t ever want to see again, that no lover of basketball should be subjected to for fear that their earnest deference would be compromised and corrupted.  No one should have to pay money to see the Knicks and the 76ers try to learn to play basketball.  No one involved with either organization should feel comfortable sitting through 82 games per year for however many years it takes to turn them into actual basketball teams.  Even if their catastrophe is by design, if I owned either of these two teams, I don’t know how I could watch my team play the way the Knicks and 76ers played tonight and not want to obliterate my entire payroll.  If the Knicks were my team, I’d want everyone associated with the last 18 games as far away from my franchise as possible.  No one — no player, no coach, no equipment guy — no one associated with the franchise as it stands right now is allowed back in Madison Square Garden if the Knicks are my team.  Anyone who thinks that it’s impossible to fail a franchise after just 42 games hasn’t watched the 2015 Knicks.  Phil Jackson has failed.