The Knicks begin the second half of their season Thursday night in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, birthplace of freedom and also of The Process, the much-debated plan to revive the 76ers that started as a think-tank blueprint and has evolved (or devolved) into a punch line.
Eleven hundred miles south of Wells Fargo Center in Port St. Lucie — home to Applebee’s, Carraba’s and all the other main gastronomical essentials you can dream of, also known as Flushing South — the Mets were holding fast to their own version and vision of long-term prosperity. We’ll call that The Plan.
The Plan, as loosely defined by David Stearns and underwritten by Steve Cohen, goes something like this: instead of utilizing the owner’s boundless resources on get-rich-quick schemes like overpaying for free agents and obliterating luxury tax limits, the Mets will use those funds to further solidify the franchise infrastructure, to further bolster the minor league feeding system.
Whether you feel that way or not probably speaks to your level of trust in The Plan, and in the men who are implementing The Plan. And that resolve might, at the moment, be tested by two truths, one of which emerged Thursday morning and one that may have been gnawing at you for weeks now.
- Kodai Senga’s arm fatigue has now been given a name — “moderate shoulder strain” — and a prognosis — and he will almost certainly start the season on the injured list.
- A couple of ready-to-go replacements — Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery — remain available as free agents.
The Mets appear disinclined to waver from their commitment to The Plan and sign either of those pitchers, both of whom would not only benefit 2024 (assuming you believe Snell would adapt to New York and Montgomery would more consistently rise to that challenge than he did in his time as a Yankee) and whatever elements of The Plan include building a sound championship-level rotation going forward.
Cohen, you imagine, probably still has moments when his pockets are burning, hoping that some of his cash in hand can be liberated in the same manner he distributed it the last two years. Stearns, you can also imagine, is the angel on Cohen’s left shoulder preaching patience and commitment to The Plan, debating the first-time, longtime talk-radio barker sitting on Cohen’s right shoulder (and, no doubt, somewhere in his Mets-fan heart, too).
That version of Cohen certainly could clear his throat at any time. But for now, it seems that he has full faith in Stearns and his Plan, one that calls for playing all of the Mets’ cards close to the vest this year, seeing how things shake out, determining who is a keeper among this group and who can later be auctioned off, and resetting for 2025 — even if they will never say as much, given the backlash that hit at the trading deadline last year when others verbalized that very element of The Plan.
On one level, this is admirable because patience, in 2024, in any field but especially in professional sports, is a rare commodity. It is especially endangered in New York, where the price of caring for a team only goes ever skyward and where the mood after a decade of championship-free teams has become darker. And then you factor in the Mets, title-free in 38 years (and counting), where fans tend to be salty on bright summer days, and you can understand the percolating anxiety attached to this.
The Plan makes perfect sense in a vacuum, it does. It is sound, it is reasonable, and if all goes well it could have an enormous payoff. Cohen would be saved the onerous tax that any big-ticket signing this year would bring, they could completely reset what the roster looks like, and start diving into the adult end of the pool next year. In a vacuum, this is a can’t-miss outline.
But all we need to do to remind ourselves that sports doesn’t exist in a vapor-sealed bubble is to return to where we started, to Philadelphia, which in Year 10 of The Process has yet to see a championship — has yet to see the 76ers, in fact, advance to the Eastern Conference Finals, let alone the NBA Finals.
There are many things you can blame — picking Markelle Fultz over Jayson Tatum in 2017, picking Ben Simmons over Jaylen Brown a year earlier — but The Process also yielded Embiid. More to the point is, the best-laid Plans — or Processes — often need a liberal helping of good luck to go along with them in order to work.
And the Mets, lately, haven’t exactly specialized in good luck.