But those good times — which produced two titles — didn’t last all that long and by the mid-1980s, another really awful Knicks team had been installed on the Madison Square Garden marquee. In a three-season run, from 1984 to 1987, the Knicks never budged, going 24-58, 23-59 and then 24-58, most of it with Hubie Brown as coach.

His players, at various points, included a young Patrick Ewing; Bill Cartwright; Ernie Grunfeld, now the general manager of a Washington Wizards team that is much better than the current Knicks, and Bernard King, whose devastating knee injury and extended absence contributed to the onslaught of defeats.

From there, the Knicks were never truly terrible again until the dysfunction that set in in the early part of the last decade. The Knicks went 23-59 under Larry Brown in 2005-6 and had the same mark two years later under Isiah Thomas, who had been Brown’s boss and then replaced him on the bench.