From the Start, Porzingis Made It Clear He Wouldn’t Be Timid

Despite nagging injuries that limited him to 66 Knicks games this season, Kristaps Porzingis has said he will play for the Latvian national team this summer.

It’s not as if the Knicks weren’t warned; they can’t be surprised. Almost two years ago, Kristaps Porzingis announced himself to America as different, as driven, as not your just-grateful-to-be-here European tall man.
He sat down shortly before the 2015 N.B.A. draft and told Yahoo Sports: “I don’t like being labeled soft. I’m very hungry. I love the game. I’ve got to prove to coaches and G.M.s that I’m not soft just because I’m from Europe.”
This, of course, was very good news. Porzingis was shooing away stereotypical suggestions and fears that he might be a skyscraping international bust. Targeting the doubters in New York, his predraft destination of choice, he was promising that in no way was he going to be another Andrea Bargnani or Frédéric Weis, two European skeletons in the Knicks’ closet.
“I want people to get to know me,” Porzingis said. “I don’t want to be the mystery man from Europe.”
Not much later, after the shock wore off that the Knicks had chosen this startlingly long 19-year-old, bedecked on draft night in a loud burgundy suit, New York was pinching itself and praying Porzingis wasn’t too good to be true. The city’s basketball-loving masses were dazzled by his confident smile, his cultural ease and his knack for an enlightening quotation or quip.
Should anyone now be astonished that Porzingis, after two seasons of standard Knicks dysfunction, has begun acting out like any American-born prodigy, trying to set the rules in a calculated mind game of truth or consequence?
Unhappy with the direction of the franchise and the chaos and haplessness of Phil Jackson’s reign as team president, Porzingis blew off his season-concluding exit meeting with Jackson two weeks ago. He rode around Manhattan on a bicycle and then went home to Latvia, where he announced he would play this summer for his national team — despite nagging injuries that limited him this season to 66 games — even though the Knicks would rather he not.
Be it out of his own frustration or in combination with someone’s advice, he has become a behavioral hybrid — a petulant 21-year-old who is also demonstrating a tired-of-the-nonsense leadership and delivering to James L. Dolan the badly needed message that the Knicks franchise is officially on the clock.
Dolan, as the team’s owner, needs to stop hiding behind Jackson and remember that within a few years Porzingis will have free-agent options. In a recent interview with a Latvian magazine, Porzingis, while expressing a diplomatic desire to remain in New York, added that winning would be his priority and the motivation in any eventual long-term decision-making process.

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