What banished him from better days

to play the Prince of Castaways?

-E.A. Robinson

How far Isiah has fallen.  Does anyone recall the movie Hoop Dreams, the documentary about two poor kids from Chicago hoping to make it big in basketball?  The one kid loved Thomas so much he wrote Isiah's nickname on his sneakers instead of his own.  No one seems to love Isiah anymore.  He said before yesterday's final game that he wasn't "looking for sympathy or anything like that."  Well, that's good.

But what exactly went wrong for Isiah?  What banished him from better days to play the Prince of Castaways?  What motivated him to assemble those castaways in the first place?  I have a theory.  Isiah Thomas has always been an overachiever.  He overcame poverty, he exploited his talent in a way the boys from Hoop Dreams could not, he got the college scholarship, his team won the National Championship, he became an NBA star and his team won the World Chapionship.  At every level he more than succeeded, he starred.  He overachieved, he perfected his craft.

And he expected to do the same as team president and coach of the Knicks.  He expected he could draft players like Renaldo Balkman and David Lee and win with them.  He expected he could trade for malcontents like Stephon Marbury and Eddie Curry and transform them.  He expected overachievement and perfection, and why not?  His entire life has been about overachievement and perfection.

Overachievers, however, demand perfection and they'd rather produce nothing than produce an inferior, or even mediocre, or even good product.  Leonardo da Vinci was a brilliant man who had a hard time finishing things.  He was a perfectionist.  His real legacies are not The Last Supper or Mona Lisa but his notebooks, which reveal ideas for thousands of projects that never got finished because da Vinci's body could not produce the magic that his mind conceived.

And like da Vinci, once Thomas realized that his team could not be made to overachieve, could not be made to be perfect, he gave up.  Once Thomas realized that Balkman and Lee, for all their effort, just aren't that talented he gave up.  Once Thomas realized that Marbury and Curry, for all their talent, just don't try very hard he gave up.

So this year Knicks' fans were left with a team that didn't practice or run set plays the last 6 weeks of the season, a team whose coach would rather not play at all than play at a mediocre level.

Overachievers are tricky people; they're hard to fault.  Without their demands for perfection the world would never have Mona Lisa.  But as a Knicks fan, next year I'm hoping for mediocrity instead of humiliation.  Let's go underachieve!