SACRE BLEU (AND ORANGE)

Just got off the phone with a dear friend as we were breaking down tonight's Knicks final in the NBA Cup and somehow we segued to the Knicks unfortunate history of obtaining the wrong French ballplayers. Allow me to explain. I love France. Without France and Lafayette, we might still be part of Great Britain. I love French food, French films, French art, French architecture. Going to France. If I’d had more confidence back in 1968 middle school, I might have opted to learn how to speak French very poorly in lieu of the unintelligible Spanish I come out with on occasion sixty years later.

Never once did the term Freedom Fries leave my mouth in the 2003 George W. Bush era hysteria over Iraq and France's reluctance to follow the US in its epic search for WMDs.

That being said, while French basketball players have been succeeding in ever increasing numbers in the Olympics (2nd place in a close loss to the US summer of 2024) and in the NBA (see Tony Parker, Victor Wembayama, Boris Diaw, Rudy Gobert, Nicholas Batum), the Knicks seem to get their French draft and trade advice from the ghost of Julia Child (see Frederic Weis, Ousmaine Dieng, Frank Ntilikina, Ronny Turiaf, Guerschon Yabusele). I'm still holding out hope for Mohamed Diawara and Yabusele (if he drops 40 pounds).

This is all so true that sometimes I imagine that Andrea Bargnani, Travis Knight, Renaldo Balkman, Cleanthony Early, and Maciej Lampe were all French.