Ahead of the worst game of professional basketball ever played, coach Dwane Casey spotted one of his former foot soldiers, Jose Calderon, passing in a hallway.
"I was just bragging about you," Casey shouted over a couple of heads.
Calderon stopped and brightened.
"About how great a pig farmer you are."
Calderon darkened and fled.
Yes, the pig farming thing.
"That's the question everybody asks," Calderon said later with a sigh. "I'm just part of a business. … We just buy some ham from farmers. I don't have any pigs. … I don't know who started this."
Let's be clear – if you make money from the farming of pigs, you're a pig farmer. Let's not sully ourselves with semantics.
Nonetheless, you do hope it all works out. Calderon is a wonderful guy. The world will always need Iberian ham. What it does not currently require is New York Knicks basketball, which would later be on full display.
This Knicks team has been dysfunctional for so long, any sustained stretch of competence risks giving the organization a nervous breakdown.
They have a new president (Phil Jackson), a new coach (Derek Fisher), a new system (the triangle) and an old star (Carmelo Anthony) who will be losing the plot after six weeks spent playing with this bunch of bums.
Hours ahead of his Madison Square Garden debut, Fisher got lured into a bizarre disquisition on the club's new emphasis on something called "mindfulness training." It's not clear if this involves machinery, or if Andrea Bargnani's brain has blown any of it up yet. Just avoid the Garden if you see smoke.
Over on the other side, you had the Toronto Raptors doing their very best not to look smug. They rolled in as if they were doing the Knicks a favour, just by showing up. They sat Kyle Lowry and Jonas Valanciunas. They started Tyler Hansbrough. That's cheek.
It's an odd feeling, watching a Toronto team traipsing through a preseason without any issues or existential problems. The players are both good and satisfied. They seem to like each other. They think they're a pretty good team and – shocker – this is not a bald-faced lie they tell season-ticket holders.
Here's a brief précis of what's happened in training camp so far:________.
You'd like to enjoy this feeling, but you can't. Instead, you vacillate between bored and terrified. Bored because it's hard to write fun stories about happy families.
But you're terrified of what could happen, after serious injuries to Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal. It's not that you're rooting for these guys. They'll be fine either way. No, you're rooting for yourself. You deserve a winner. This team owes you.
The Durant and Beal debacles are more proof that we should have torpedoed the preseason circus years ago.
These phony crusades made sense back in the days when players spent their summers working in sawmills. Scraping a few extra bucks from the ticket buying public was a nice bonus. Nowadays, it's the only reason they bother.
Today's pros play and train constantly. They don't learn anything in these games. All they're doing is risking injury in a meaningless setting, one in which they're more likely to be matched up against some no-hoper looking to make a name for himself with a flying arm bar.
To their credit, the Raptors and Knicks spent Monday night trying to make just that point.
They played a game of such shocking lethargy and ineptitude, it should have sparked a riot. The score after the first quarter was 12-12. That's not a typo.
"This might be the worst game of basketball I've ever watched," said one of the depressives on press row. Reminder: This poor wretch covers the New York Knicks for a living.
Midway through the second quarter, the same guy got up and announced, "I've had enough of this garbage." Then he left.
I've never seen the like. Either up here or down there. It's … and I hesitate to go there … unprecedented.
Despite themselves, the Raptors won 81-76.
This probably is what the Knicks are going to look like. They were terrible, and Bargnani didn't even play. Over on the sidelines, Phil Jackson was sitting, arms folded tightly, looking confused. Not angry, just confused. And maybe also angry.
He knew what he signed up for, but yeesh. … None of this matters in the least to Toronto. Their real work is in the practice gym, tightening up systems the regulars already know. They have the benefit of familiarity, a treasured asset in today's NBA. Everyone else is turning earth every year and praying. The Raptors are finally in the position to harvest something.
It's hard not to see the Knicks as the team the Raptors once were, and still might have been if they hadn't switched things up.
When that suggestion was put to coach Casey, he visibly shied.
"That's a loaded question. I'm not touching that," Casey said. "I've got our guys to worry about. I don't look past Union Station."
For the first time in a long time, that's not just a line. It's pretty good advice for the country's basketball admirers.
Cathal Kelly