Isaiah Hartenstein is the special type of good you only notice when it’s gone

For Knicks fans, watching Isaiah Hartenstein get his flowers during the Thunder’s NBA Finals run has been bittersweet, and it would never have happened if it weren’t for a former Celtics owner.

Something any longtime Knicks supporter can tell you is that it’s important to maintain perspective, to not get too high off the highs or ruined by the lows, both in life and in sports, because we’ve seen it all. A crucial piece of this frank awareness is recognizing your blessings as they come to you, because a restrained, compartmentalized segment of your consciousness appreciates that such blessings won’t last forever. This sober engagement with sports helps cut down on disappointment, and crucially regret, because you’re rarely surprised by much (with the possible exception of a near mathematically impossible three-minute rally that can destroy an entire postseason of good vibes).

This is the exact reason why I am so gobsmacked, so floored by how long I have been grieving the entire city of New York’s loss of Oklahoma City Thunder center Isaiah Hartenstein. Like so many fans and NBA decision makers before me, I somehow missed how special he was, and how much I needed him in my life, until it was too late.

A distinction Hartenstein himself will make when you tell him the NBA is trending small is that it’s actually not, it’s going skilled, demanding a wider range of talents and abilities from each player on the floor. This is an obvious and self-evident claim, but we tend to only understand it in one way: That we now have seven-footers that can put the ball on the floor and shoot threes. It’s a revolution that has fractured and polarized the center position, as we briefly discussed in the first round when considering the league’s other great Isaiah, Detroit’s Stewart. Our current crop of NBA centers have largely been siloed into meatheads like Stewart, and stretch 5s, long, silky, dead-eye shooting ball handlers who can help neutralize traditional bigs who need to live in the paint to serve as effective deterrents on defense.

What makes Isaiah Hartenstein special, and sneakily one of the most skilled players in the league, is that as his career and talents have matured he has proven he can be both of these things: Force and finesse. This means he’s a chameleonic value add to any roster you sign him to, and accordingly has been many different players to many different teams, because he can play any style, and he has proven to be the last crucial piece formalizing Sam Presti’s dynasty ambitions.

Let’s zoom out. Isaiah Hartenstein was born in Eugene, Oregon and became a man in Germany, where his basketball-player-turned-coach-father, Florian, was raised before meeting his mother as a college hooper in the Pacific Northwest. Hartenstein has excelled in every basketball situation he’s been in, everywhere he’s gone, at every level of competition. In 2012, Isaiah’s youth team — the Artland Young Dragons in Youth Basketball Bundesliga — won the championship and he was named league MVP. He was 15 years old and 6’8.5 at the time, and even then looked like he was hand-carved by 13th-century Polynesians (He’s a solid seven feet now). Isaiah played four years total in Europe (most significantly in Lithuania), and was eventually drafted 43rd by the Houston Rockets in 2018, which explains why he’s both the youngest 13-year veteran in the league as well as its most polished 27-year-old.

But even considering Isaiah’s game was one of the many lost in European translation by NBA Draft talent evaluators, his nomadic journey through the league through his first four seasons is hard to understand. This draft profile for instance, describes a player who is immature, emotional and erratic, who has bad mechanics, who misses layups, who is turnover-prone and foul-prone, who blows coverages on defense and makes too many mistakes. It’s the exact and total opposite description of the player I fell in love with in New York. And yet in four years Hartenstein played for five teams, somehow always looking better and more valuable at each stop, but being forced to move on or bet on himself nonetheless. He went from the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in the G-League, to the end of the Harden era in Houston (where of course, Hartenstein credits Chris Paul for teaching him how to watch film), to a bifurcated season where he played 30 games in Denver, then was traded with two draft picks in exchange for JaVale McGee from the Cavaliers, to a single season for the Clippers, to finally, signed, quite tragically, to just a two year deal in New York.

I was largely ignorant to all this history. The Isaiah Hartenstein I was cautiously optimistic about adding to the 22-23 Knicks roster as an $8 million a year Mitchell Robinson backup was a player I only knew as a guy the sharp, nerd ball-watchers liked as a low-risk back of the rotation signing. In some clumsily curated YouTube clips, he struck me as an aforementioned “soft” and stretchy 5, a perimeter player for the Clippers who didn’t take many 3s but could hit them when asked, and worked as a secondary creator out of the post or on the perimeter. A big who could work as a nimble, fine-motor-skilled vibe shifting ice to Mitch’s fire. It was an assumption that wasn’t far from the critical consensus at the time.

What we learned is Hartenstein is one of the clearest instances of opportunity dictating a player’s ceiling- and our understanding of both what it is, and what can be- in recent memory. As is the case with every player coached by (former! Knicks coach) Tom Thibodeau, Hartenstein had to earn trust from Thibs and the minutes that came with them, then responded to those minutes by remaking himself in the Thibs image of a big man, an off-ball infantryman closer to Dennis Rodman (or Mitchell Robinson) than Bucks era Brook Lopez. With Mitch missing in action for long spells, in his second season under Thibs, Hartenstein emerged as a monster rim protector and hard hat, in-traffic rebound securer. He was a willing, gifted passer and air traffic controller (who would hold teammates accountable and chew them out for failing to back cut, because he would find them) of the Knicks offense when Jalen Brunson wasn’t running the entire show. His odd Frankenstein baby hook/floater/push became one of the most inevitable and unstoppable shots in the NBA. He was a beloved teammate whose personality, like his game, meshed with everyone else’s. It was one of the most pleasant surprises of a season filled with them, and then that season ended.

In the Spring of 1983, as the NBPA and the owners were putting the finishing touches on the first and most devastating scale back of players’ rights and earning potential in the institution of a salary cap, an incoming owner of the Celtics, a franchise that was about to be purchased, raised an objection. The would-be owner, Alan Cohen said, “I’m not going to agree to a deal unless I can be assured, under any circumstances, I can keep Larry Bird.” And this was how Bird Rights were born: As a salary cap tool designed to allow teams to exceed the cap to retain the players they want to keep, which ensured the newly formed salary cap was a soft one, open to exceptions.

Over the course of four decades, as part of a greed-driven project to idiot proof cap management and maximize the yearly return on investment for franchises that increase in value exponentially every year — often at the detriment of players, fans, and the league itself — Bird Rights have been whittled down to a pale interpretation of their original intent. One of these owner-inserted loopholes is a provision that Bird Rights only apply to players who are on year three of their contract. With an increasingly impossible to navigate salary cap, GMs like Leon Rose have to be cautious and sign contracts that leave room for contingencies and wiggle room — which is precisely what the Knicks did when the team bet on Hartenstein’s modest two year deal and hit the fucking jackpot — but there is barely a mechanism to reward this kind of savvy talent scouting.

Hartenstein was afforded “Early Bird Rights”, a pittance which means a team up against the salary cap can re-sign a player who has played for them two consecutive years to a contract rewarding them up to four years at 175% of their current salary. This meant the Knicks could offer Hartenstein up to $18.1 million and change a year, which was a hefty bump that immediately went on the table, and served as a cruel sliver of hope to cling to as the fanbase wondered how much more a rival would have to pay to pry away the player who found himself, team camaraderie, and a home in New York. But the arbitrary cap on the offer meant the Knicks were susceptible to losing out if a team was willing to shell out a previously inconceivable three-year max of $87 million which would constitute the richest free agent contract ever handed out in Thunder history, a well over 300% bump which would also give Hartenstein the ability to re-enter free agency with a new contract ceiling before hitting 30. We all know how it played out.

The player Hartenstein has become for OKC is another remaking. An uncontested starter of 53 games (out of an eligible 57), playing nearly 30 minutes a game with a stacked bench all deserving of minutes behind him, but featuring no one better suited, more perfect to play the 5 on a 68-win team. He logged career-highs in points (with 2-point percentage slightly down but attempts doubled), rebounds, and assists. But it’s more than counting stats, Hartenstein, along with fellow former undervalued castoff Alex Caruso, have added a dynamic, two-way, Thibs-brand of grit and nastiness, as well as a seasoned calm that the team’s character had been missing. Hartenstein has been a rock and mentor for an impossibly young team, most notably by taking much of the traditional center duties off Chet Holmgren’s shoulders, which has helped the latter flourish.

Hartenstein is rangier and more explosive in OKC, on a transition-heavy team, showing off his full court mobility as a nasty finisher threat and his quick-processing basketball brain when gameplay devolves into chaos ball, a brutal screener and pinpoint facilitator, a final missing piece that has set his adopted team up as a contender for the foreseeable future, for at least as long as they can hold onto him. As the MVP of the league said in the midst of the series the team had to survive to earn their stripes and presumably, Oklahoma’s first NBA title: “Isaiah is, at the end of the day, a really good basketball player. Whatever situation you throw him in, he’s going to flourish because of that. He does the right things, he has the right intentions.” It’s a sentiment no Knicks fan needs to hear, because we already know.

It’s impossible to know what the Knicks would’ve looked like this season if they retained Hartenstein, but without him or a viable starting center at the outset of the season, several artful but panicked trades were made that sped up the franchise timeline and forced an all-in hand. We saw in Indiana this year what the power of patience and continuity can do for a good, solid team that needs no rejiggering, and no one is saying that won’t be the outcome here (sans a head coach that depending on your perspective, might have held back their potential). Maybe we’ll look back in a few years and be able to say what transpired was a best-case scenario for all parties.

But some nights, when I’m riding my bike home from the city, I’ll pass a tinted escalade, the type Florian Hartenstein used to drive after Knick games to chauffeur his son back to his wife and child in Westchester while Isaiah would lay out in backseat and shoot the shit over the phone with his fellow frontcourt mate and best friend on the team, Mitchell Robinson. And I think about that moment, when Hartenstein was coming into his own, and the team was young and beginning to explore its potential and define its future, and how though it was incredibly exciting, I didn’t fully appreciate how limited my time watching Isaiah Hartenstein as a fan would be. Mostly because I simply assumed he’d be part of that future, so I missed how great it was having him in my life. And I think about how many times I may have rode past his Escalade on one of those postgame evenings, blissfully unaware, because he was here with us in New York, and all things were still possible. And now he’s gone forever.