A reliable and deserving piñata for critics since the turn of the century, the Knicks are suddenly drawing applause for going all-in on front-office diversity, for being progressively bold, for doing the right thing.

Please be advised: This is not the first time in the team’s long but recently stormy social history that it has been at the forefront of minority advancement.

Seventy years ago, the Knicks — or at least their visionary coach, Joe Lapchick — were the first team to push integration on a league that would, within three years, merge with another to form the N.B.A.

Not with one player, or two, but with a whole team.

While coaching the Knicks of the Basketball Association of America in 1947, Lapchick partnered with Bob Douglas in an attempt to have Douglas’s barnstorming and all-black New York Renaissance, or Rens, admitted to the league, intact.