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Who Let All These Knicks Into The NBA Finals?

The NBA Finals are no place for a New York Knick. And yet four refugees from the NBA's most ridiculous franchise have put their stamp on these Finals.
Photo by Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

A disturbing undercurrent runs through these NBA playoffs, threatening the legacy of the entire 2015 season. This is something far more unorthodox and insidious than the injuries that have created the strange circumstances of these NBA Finals. Something both sinister and strange. In short: there are New York Knicks all over these NBA Finals, and it's weird as hell.

It is June, as you've probably noticed, which means we should only be hearing about New York in connection with the NBA Draft or some sort of tragic-ridiculous front office scandal. Nobody wants to hear announcers discussing the Knicks during a NBA Finals broadcast, least of all Knicks fans. It is too soon. It may always be too soon.

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Read More: James Dolan Is Back To Ruin The Knicks, And Everything Else

And yet there is no escape. In a weird reality beyond Phil Jackson's Old Man Yells At Cloud Twitter rants and the misogynist organizational hijinks of James Dolan and Isiah Thomas, a quartet of players dealt away from MSG—David Lee of the Warriors, Timofey Mozgov, J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert of the Cavaliers—have each put their own unique stamp on this championship series. Some of the most important players in the NBA Finals are refugees from arguably the least relevant franchise in the sport. Let's try to make sense of this.

Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith: The Salary Dumps

J.R. Smith might be the most consistent person in the NBA. No player resists to urge to expose his own unique essence—his qi, if you will—for all to see quite like J.R. How that translates on the basketball court is an altogether different matter. Knicks fans barely had time to digest the future impact of the reigning Sixth Man of the Year's three-year, $17.9 million extension in the summer of 2013 before discovering the Smith would need knee surgery and would miss the first five games of the 2013-14 campaign for failing a drug test. The next 18 months were a menagerie of slapstick shoelace-related incidents, benchings, and hilarious/poignant cameos by his brother, Chris.

Since arriving in Cleveland, Smith has shown off the full J.R. arsenal, earning his second suspension in as many playoff appearances, coming back with a "Don't worry, baby, I've changed" performance in the Conference Finals, and then delivering a Game 2 so monumentally stupid that ABC didn't have enough time to air their complete "dumb second-half J.R. fouls" montage. It might not have been suitable for a family audience anyway.

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To win this series, the Cavaliers must get a more consistent performance from Shumpert, the player shipped to Cleveland as the spoonful of sugar to make J.R.'s $6.4 million player option go down. The former first-round pick is an athletic, charismatic wing with high-end 3-and-D potential who, like most Knicks draft picks, never quite realized his potential during his stay in New York. He is struggling with a shoulder injury, but the Cavs will need him to get through screens—never his strongest suit—and harass the Warriors' shooters, who won't stay this cold forever. Shumpert has been virtually unplayable from inside the arc, where he has shot just 26.3 percent. Still, Shumpert can help if he can continue to keep defenses honest from beyond, where he's shot 36.4 percent. In his limitations, variability, and plain bad luck, Shumpert may be the purest Knick among the team's Finals Four.

Look at how much fun they're having not being on the Knicks! What a blast. — Photo by David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

Timofey Mozgov: The Throw-In

What you must understand about James Dolan—the Knicks owner who fought with his own front office to add Mozgov to the deadline deal to acquire impending free agent Carmelo Anthony—is that he is an artist. Artists don't negotiate. They dream. Dolan dreamt of Melo and wouldn't be denied; more to the point, he would not wait the requisite few months to sign a player who had already gone public with his desire to leave his team as an unrestricted free agent. One pick, two picks, a pick swap on top of every single young prospect on the roster—that is for the bean counters, and doesn't matter to an artist like Dolan. You wouldn't stop the Eagles from adding another 12-string guitar overdub to "Hotel California." You couldn't. Neither could you keep James Dolan from achieving his vision in the most self-defeating possible way.

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Mozgov never really found the right fit before landing in Cleveland, whether with Mike D'Antoni's Knicks or the uptempo Nuggets. LeBron James' teams have generally played a slower brand of basketball over the past few years—Cleveland ranked 25th in pace this season—which suits the Russian big man like a pair of Leonid Brezhnev's undies. He has been the Cavs' second-best player during the Finals, averaging 13.0 points and 7.7 rebounds. More importantly, he is proving to be a matchup nightmare for the Warriors, who prefer to play small. He has found a home. James Dolan almost certainly does not remember him. He has moved on. He is writing a blues song about Alec Baldwin or something.

David Lee: The Redemption Case

Though he hasn't played for the orange and blue in five seasons, David Lee appeared set for the most sublimely Knicks-ian Finals of all: watching the entire series from the bench despite being the highest-paid player on the Warriors' roster by virtue of a six-year, $79.5 million deal he signed in New York. Lee played an important role in Golden State's revival, earning a trip to the All-Star Game in 2013, but his laughably poor defense kept the Warriors from truly competing in the brutal West. Steve Kerr's decision to promote Draymond Green to the starting lineup, while nailing Lee's ass to the bench for most of the season, helped propel the team to elite status, and it stuck through the playoffs. Lee had played all of 68 minutes in the postseason prior to Game 3, when a desperate Steve Kerr inserted Lee into the lineup in a last-ditch attempt to counter the rampaging Cavs.

Shockingly or not—for all the things he's bad at, Lee is also stubbornly kind of good—Lee helped whittle a 20-point deficit down to three in the closing minutes. He finished with 11 points, four rebounds and two assists in just 13 minutes, and his playmaking ability at the four was a Godsend to a Warriors team that appeared to have run out of answers. Kerr has already said that Lee will be back in the rotation in Game 4.

And so it has come to this: Lee, Mozgov, Shumpert, or Smith could very well prove to be the unlikely hero for this year's NBA Champion. No Knick has claimed that distinction since the late Dean "The Dream" Meminger in 1973. We can only hope that Dean The Dream is looking down with pride on the newest member(s) of the NBA's most exclusive of fraternities: NBA Champions with ties to Madison Square Garden.