Knicks could be oldest team in NBA history, watch a lot of Matlock

Stop saying that the Knicks bench walked the earth with the early dinosaurs. Let’s not blow this out of proportion. There is no way Kurt Thomas was on the earth during the Triassic era walking around with Nothosaurs. Maybe like the Crustaceous Period with the Triceratops, but no earlier.

Knick age jokes — “What was it like to climb the ladder and take the ball out of the peach basket? — will be all the rage this season because the Knicks are going to be old. Historically old. They have added this summer Jason Kidd (age 39), Kurt Thomas (39), Marcus Camby (38), Argentinian “rookie” Pablo Prigioni (35) and maybe Rasheed Wallace (38, but he has not officially signed practiced with the team yet).

Or, look at it this way, courtesy the Wall Street Journal:

The 2012 Knicks will be almost five years older than they were last year, when the average player was 27 years and 300 days old. Assuming Wallace signs, their top 13 players would be, on average, 32 years and 240 days old—the oldest team in NBA history, according to Stats LLC. No team has ever gotten so much older from one season to the next.

Coaches tend to be okay with this and so do some GMs — they trust that age, that veteran savvy. They trust those guys to make good decisions.

But when Thaddeus Young and Nick Young come off the Sixers bench and blow right around those old Knicks legs for a dunk, the jokes are not going to be as funny. A few veterans on the bench makes sense, but that much is going to come back and bite them.