We all know the Knicks went through a tumultuous as fuck period of roster turnover this past season. After all, it was the first year of a new GM/coach, what do you expect?

But it wasn't until yesterday I really looked at how damn much our roster changed. I was dicking around on basketballvalue.com - best site ever, by the way, and I just thought to myself: holy shit, the Knicks played a lot of people this season.

23 different guys played for the Knicks this season. Only six guys who played for Isiah Thomas are still on the team, only eight guys who came out of training camp on the roster are still there.Considering the Knicks hadn't played more than 15 guys since 2005-06, that's a huge amount of people. The 23 guys we played is good for second in the league - the Bobcats played 24 people, and started 19 of them. I would point them out as an example of shitty management, but, hey, they won 3 games more than us. So, stop laughing. 

So the first thing I thought was: holy shit, could I name all these dudes? I quickly found I could not, one or two legitimately slipped my mind. So I put this question to you: Right below here are the uni numbers each player wore, with a link to their basketball-reference.com page, which, surprisingly, only took me about five minutes to put together. No cheating by looking at the roster thing on the side of this site or at some other website. I want to see if anybody can name everybody who was on a Knick roster this year: this includes both the 23 people who saw court time with the Knicks this season, in addition to the three players who were under contract with the Knicks, but never actually got any tick. There's a poll at the bottom of the page, and tell me who you missed in the comments. 

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 25, 31, 31, 32, 34, 35, 42, 44, 50

Now, I'ma quickly discuss why it's crazy that the Knicks played so many peeps: By comparison, the Knicks played 22 guys in Isiah's first year, when he traded for Stephon, Tim Thomas, Nazr Mohammed, Keith Van Horn, and the unforgettable Moochie Norris, retaining seven of the players he had at the year's beginning, so this sort of crazy roster turnover could be indicative of some sort of paradigm shift similar to the one Isiah brought, except Isiah essentially turned a borderline playoff team into the massive sack of shit we had for his years in office, and Coach D'Antoni, hopefully, not so much.

So back to the quiz - pretty tough, huh? I mean, you shouldn't have missed more than four or five, but, still, I wouldn't have ever thought I could miss three people from a Knicks roster, but, hey, it's possible. It's just a really random bunch of people - some dudes who never played, some guys who seem like they haven't been on the team for years, a few guys you might just plain old forget were on the team, and like five guys who only hung around for one or two games.  So, yeah, tell errbody how you did. Peep the poll!

History is filled with depictions of hell, the worst possible plane of existence possible. Homer had Odysseus descend into the underworld, Dante wrote about his Inferno, and DraftExpress.com warned us that hell is, in fact, Cheick Samb's worst case scenario, something so horrible that mere words and the human imagination cannot truly describe it. But I'm here to tell you that they're all wrong.

Hell is the last eight minutes of last night's Kings-Knicks game.

I decided to give the game a check last night. Yes, there were magnificient college games on, but, shit, we were playing the Sacramento Kings. The worst team in the league, with a staggeringly awful 0-28 mark against the Eastern Conference. So, I figured we'd be up. 

We were down 27, and the first thing I saw was Nate Robinson airballing a three. The crowd was steadily booing, and although the announcers were Mike Breen and Clyde Frazier, you could barely hear them over the constant gnashing of teeth and wailing. 

I once wanted to start a blog chronicling garbage time NBA minutes. They're extraordinarily shitty, and fascinating, and I could write a book about it, but this is a recap, so I'll be brief. It's really freaky and demoralizing. Everybody just kind of stands around on d, and although there's no crowd and the game is over, the arena still plays the same stupid prompts every time somebody scores - "QUENTIIIIIIN RICHARDSON!" (pause) "Q!". So this is what I saw. 

Chris Wilcox violently slammed home two alley-oops and took off near the free throw line on an explosive jam with about 8 seconds left. Nobody was impressed. 

Cheick Samb and Wilcox played simultaneously, causing the stock of hidous braids - ticker: HDB - to rise 7 percent on the day, a lone bright spot when the rest of the market floundered. (I assume.)

For the Kings, Ike Diogu and the NBA's only part-ogre, Calvin Booth, were in, and weirding everybody out. Some people say that the sight of Calvin Booth will make a baby spontaneously cry. However, they won't cry long - Calvin will eat a whole baby in less than 13 seconds. Snakes can unhinge their jaws to swallow large food, but Calvin can actually unhinge his entire head, explaining his appearance.

The Knicks brought in Demetris Nichols with four minutes and Cheick Samb with three. I will profile what I saw of each. 

Demetris Nichols, like any garbage time player should, gunned, chucking up four shots in as many minutes, hitting one of two off-balance Hughesian 20 footers, missing a three, and finishing on a nice drive. He knocked the ball away from penetrating dribblers once or twice, but I chalk this up to the fact that no dribbler with two minutes actually expects their defender to try and steal the ball. 

Chieck Samb swatted the shit out of a shot on the way down with enough force to send it to the Knicks bench, where a mildly surprised Chris Wilcox caught it. I think if one team goes down by 20 points or more, certain rules, like goaltending, should be turned off. Also, teams should be arbitrarily awarded "Style Points" based on the diffciulty of the moves they make, until one team fills up the style meter, earning a "Gamebreaker".

Cheick looks funny running, which is what happens when your, you know, freakishly gigantic. He's awkward in pretty much every facet of the game, dribbling, shooting -- he chucked up a pretty gross 18 footer, as he is want to do - and on one possession, rebounded the ball at about rim height, bent over till his hands were about two feet above the floor, dribbled, and went back up with it, and, obviously, got partially blocked. He finished 0-2.

True dialogue:

Breen: "That's Larry Hughes' first field goal of the night. He was 0-7 beforehand"

Frazier: "Poor shot selection tonight from Larry."

What, Clyde? Poor shot selection from Hughes? That's the least insightful statement in world history. That's not surprising. That's just nature. Like saying "Poor running selection from the lemmings tonight." I've decided that we can no longer be angry at Hughes' shot selection from night to night, or comment on it. It's a part of nature. It will never become better, or worse. Referencing The Wire is played out and shit, but I've decided that Larry Hughes is Snot Boogie.

Except instead of stealing the money every game of dice, he shoots. And he always will, never won't. And people have been beating the shit out of him every time he does it for his whole life. But there's nothing you can do about it besides killing benching him, and, like the guy says, you can't kill Larry Hughes. It's just Larry Hughes. He's going to shoot, and that's what he's going to do, and there's nothing we can do about it. This is America.

Like I said earlier, they keep doing that dumb stadium pump up shit up till the bitter end. And about two minutes to go, they played Michael Jackson, and Anthony Anderson - star of such works as "Hang Time", "Kangaroo Jack", "Malibu's Most Wanted", and, for some reason, "The Departed" - breakdanced from his courtyard seats with frightening results, busting out such moves as the moonwalk, the "twirl-on-your-back", a split, and quite possibly the running man. That's pretty much a summary of the game. I have no idea what the final score was, and I don't care. The point is, Anthony Anderson breakdanced on the sidelines, and a team with playoff aspirations last week decided it wasn't worth it anymore.

Anyway, I don't remember what the score was, and I don't particularly care.

I was on the Knicks website about five minutes ago, because I wanted to see if they played sometime in the next few days, and something caught my eye: it was an ad saying "Download the song "Go NY Go!"", and it had a little picture of Q-Tip.

Now, back at the beginning of the year, I was psyched about the prospect of Q-Tip recording a song, but, only a few months later, I'd almost completely forgotten that such a song even existed. The Knicks stopped using it in ads, showing it during games, etc. I haven't been to the Garden all year, so maybe they're showing it there, but it's completely fallen out of usage on the tv at least. So I decided to take a quick look back at the video itself, and quickly realized why. Take a peek:

One thing you'll notice is that people in this video can be put into two distinct categories

People who play for the New York Knicks:

Chris Duhon

Nate Robinson

Wilson Chandler (who is in the video for approximately 3/4 of a second)

Quentin Richardson (who is basically out of the rotation at this point)

People who do not play for the New York Knicks, one of which is under contract but is kinda fat and has only played +/- two minutes this season and has no desire to play and wouldn't help that much anyway

Jamal Crawford

Q-Tip

Stephon Marbury

The Knicks City Dancers

Eddy Curry

Although we've all been absurdly disappointed and frustrated at times with our team's performance over the past few months, and for good reason, but think about this: three or four months ago, the Knicks PR staff thought that the people in this video were meant to represent the Knicks season.

Six of them - Q-Tip, the three Knicks City Dancers, Steph and Eddy - have combined for about two minutes of total playing time, and Jamal hasn't been with the team for months. And yet, hey, we're on the brink of a playoff spot. The players figuring most prominently in the video - Steph and Jamal - play for other teams altogether. On the other hand, two of our most important players - Duhon and Chandler - are barely in here, David Lee only comes in in the highlight reel in the background.

What does all this mean? Well, not much. Anybody could've figured that Steph or Eddy Curry would've had a reduced role this year, while other more D'Antoni-ish players would succeed. But it is really strange and funny to look back on how quickly and how dramatically the concept of who the Knicks' best players are has changed. 

Peep the poll!