“It begins with a question.” This statement is how Knicks president Steve Mills began his recent blog post on thegarden.com, Madison Square Garden’s website. “How can we build a Knicks team that possesses true unity of purpose, a group in which everyone so truly believes in one another that together we can create something unique, something special?” he asked. It is an idealistic and rhetorical query, one that long-suffering Knicks fans desperately hope is successfully answered not in words but by results. The Knicks have not made the playoffs in the last four seasons and are still recovering from a dysfunctional 82-game schedule that concluded with the exit of former team president Phil Jackson. And there remains the unresolved matter of Carmelo Anthony urgently desiring to be traded to the Houston Rockets. After the noise of possible trade scenarios and Anthony’s reported discontent with the Knicks failing to engineer a deal with the Rockets died down, Anthony and the franchise became the subjects of conjecture once again when the Knicks excluded his image from their 2017-18 season marketing material, which features Kristaps Porzingis, Willy Hernangomez and rookie Frank Ntilikina. The obvious reason for this exclusion is that Anthony and the Knicks know the 33-year-old, 10-time All-Star and future Hall of Fame inductee will be in another team’s uniform by the NBA trade deadline in February. However, Mills seems purposeful and sincere in his self-mandate to establish stability and credibility for an organization that has been viewed as one of the most fractured and mismanaged operations in major sports despite its $3.3 billion valuation, ranking seventh among all global sports, franchises and tops in the NBA. Mills wrote, “As I said last month on the day we introduced Scott Perry as our new general manager, we are devoted to a bedrock principle—to restore the pride, work ethic and accountability that comes with playing in New York. Dogged defense. Crisp, unselfish ball movement. Scraping for loose balls. These will be our hallmarks. And our plan to become more youthful and athletic is underway with 22-year-old Kristaps Porzingis, the return of Tim Hardaway Jr., 25, Willy Hernangómez, 23, and with the debut of our first-round draft pick, Frank Ntilikina, just 19.”

The transformation will take some years to come to fruition if Mills’ plan works. Nevertheless, the philosophy and strategy are sound. The most important measure will be implementation.