Steve Popper: Fun of Knicks' quest to repeat as NBA champs lost in contract fights

We all know that when you turn to the sports pages, when you pop on a Knicks game or take your seat in Madison Square Garden, there is a simple hope, that you can enjoy the game. And no one, no matter how statistically-inclined they are, wants to have your interest in the defending NBA champions turned into a lesson in salary cap math.

Knicks fans waited 53 years for a championship and now, before the first preseason game tipped off, before the rings are handed out for that title that finally came, the payroll of the team has already begun to wipe away the immaculate vibes that the players on the court worked so hard to create.

Monday morning, Karl-Anthony Towns made no effort to hide his displeasure with the Knicks' approach to negotiations on a new contract extension for him. And now when you tuned in for the Knicks opening preseason game Monday night or when you head to Madison Square Garden Thursday night, you have to wonder if after all of this time, after the front office put together a roster that has been rightly celebrated around the basketball world, it is going to tumble down over dollars that most of us can’t imagine.

And I don’t mean over the money Towns is asking. We can debate how much is too much for a professional athlete or an entertainer. Are the numbers astronomical? Yes. Will generations ever get to the last dollar of the next contract for Towns, whether it’s four years and $200 million or four years and $277 million, a contract that is following hundreds of millions in prior earnings? Maybe not.

But this is the world we are in and it’s worth remembering that the players aren’t the only ones making money in this game.

So while money is pouring into the NBA, television deals, gambling dollars — and did we mention the billions coming to owners in expansion fees that the players don’t get a piece of in the collective bargaining agreement? — we get the players in the headlines and wonder why they just can’t make it work.

You can blame the players for their paychecks or mock the players association for negotiating a deal with the second apron essentially putting a hard cap on team payrolls. But the thing is, it’s not a hard cap in the deal. It’s a hard cap in the suites of ownership and front offices who don’t want to pay the excessive taxes or put restrictions on their flexibility.

But you don’t really want to do that, do you? You just want to see the team that you waited 53 years to arrive to remain intact, for the vibes to remain immaculate and to see if they can run it back again.

“Yeah, I mean, simply put, I want to do something that can keep the team together, and that can work with the Knicks and also values me,” Towns said Monday morning. “And, I mean, none of those things have come close to happening.”

And that’s really the point. The Knicks are one of the NBA’s elite teams on the court right now. All of the pieces are in place — or almost all of them because they already lost Mitchell Robinson by refusing to slip into the second apron — to chase another title. And that’s all this should be about right now.

“We try to talk about everything,” Mike Brown said at the start of training camp. “We don't want to leave any elephants in the room. But you know, that's something that Leon [Rose] and his group, they've been really good at good at, and some would argue but the best in the NBA at. And so I had a lot of faith in them and, you know, the players and the agents, whoever's involved -- I'm not involved in it -- that they'll figure it out and our group has done a fantastic job of understanding that, you know, we can only control what we can control.”

Still, the Knicks are walking a tightrope, not only planning for how to combat the Philadelphia 76ers with their newly-constructed roster featuring four All-Stars, or the Miami Heat with Giannis Antetokounmpo, or any of the vastly improved teams in the Eastern Conference for 82 games, but left to balance that with questions about Towns contract or the future of Josh Hart or Deuce McBride, not to mention the looming contract extension for Jalen Brunson.

But you don’t want to — and you shouldn’t have to — think about that. It should be able to be about basketball because the magic of the second apron is that teams want to remain under it to keep the flexibility to build a championship team.

The Knicks already built that team. It’s about keeping it together now and that’s not in the hands of Karl-Anthony Towns or Josh Hart or Deuce McBride. They’ve all maintained they want to finish their careers in New York. It’s up to the folks signing the checks to make that possible.

By Steve Popper

steve.popper@newsday.com@StevePopper

Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.