Hey Admin , Extremely nice blog , if you need backlinks to your website I provide upto 10,000 high quality SEO backlinks for only $5. Check it out here :http://bit.ly/msweL2…

Trade Steph, can Isaiah and keep Brown. Rose and Francis come of the books fairly soon, other albatross contracts do too. A couple of pieces have trade value still (Nate and Crawford, Frye) if the Knicks can get something (anything) for they, they should try. They need to blow this thing up and start over. Ewing, Oakley, Starks, Mason, they ain’t coming back. This current crop has nowhere near the juice to make a run as any Knicks incarnation since Patrick got the boot. Send ‘em all back.

Having said that, I think this is the evidence of Thomas’ “vision”. Virtually, every move Thomas made before this year (besides the Jerome James signing) was done to “get younger and more athletic” or to add draft picks. He basically accomplished his goal but had no other plan beyond that it seems.

Now with the addition of Larry Brown, his style of coaching/ego is almost contradictory to what Thomas has done. With LB trashing all of these young and athletic players in the press and not having any sort of playing rotation, we made 2 pretty asinine deals this year for Jalen Rose and Steve Francis trying to get Brown players he wants and basically going against what Thomas has stated his “plan” is. Now we are stuck in limbo with a team full of pretty good “young and athletic” players, a few overpaid malcontents, and a coach who pretty much did one of the worst coaching jobs in NBA history (starting players based on their college or hometown affiliation??).

Anyway, one thing I think can’t be compared is this team, while very bad record wise, to the Layden era teams. Those teams were filled with marginal role players who were WAY over paid and not fun to watch at all. At least these overpaid players are young and exciting (or at least show flashes of excitement) and have the infamous “upside” label.

One thing’s for sure: the Knicks have stayed in the media since IT took over. I mean with the 15 trades, and now coaching circus/soap opera, we are guaranteed to have at least 12 headlines a day. We had to be the most publicized last place team in the history of the NBA. Maybe this was Dolan’s goal all along?? Just to stay in the media and bring attention to himself…it sure doesn’t hurt his ticket sales at MSG.

Once someone gets a TRUE plan/vision and sticks to it we will forever toil in the NBA cellar with the highest payroll.

One side note to mention: I think that ex-players make the WORST GMs in the NBA. With the exception of Jerry West, all of the ex-players have done a horrible job of running their respective teams. Here’s my list of ex-players “playing” GM and have no clue what the hell they are doing.

Danny Ainge
Kevin McHale
Paxon brothers
Kiki Vandeweghe
Chris Mullin
Elgin Baylor (not really his fault)

Larry Bird doesn’t really count since Donnie Walsh makes all the moves and Joe Dumars is the only exception.

Here is a rundown of all GMs:
http://www.hoopshype.com/general_managers/isiah_thomas.htm

But really…Goo I feel your frustration…I have felt it myself. But there’s simply no way we see ourselves under the cap before 2010. Given that inescapable fact, we would have to wait at least three years before we could even start to implement your plan and it would be 2012 before we could see any hope of success.

We might as well try something else in the interim — something that doesn’t keep pushing that salary cap date further and further into the future — but something more along the lines of what Dave is talking about.

This is something the Knicks haven’t ever done, but it couldn’t possibly be worse than today’s binge-spending unmitigated disaster. Dolan needs to stop letting the New York media run the damn team, stop hiring moron “established” GM’s who wouldn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, stop signing middle-class and/or past their prime free agents to multi-year, cap-murdering deals, and treat this like a freaking NBA franchise for once… A team of NBDL castoffs would be better than 2006′s trainwreck; at least they’d be under the cap! It’s time to stop letting the inmates run the asylum, and give the fans their money’s worth, dammit.

I certainly look forward to the conclusion, but I don’t think you need a hard budget to avoid taking on untradeable contracts. Rather, the Knicks should avoid taking on duplicative (or simply poor) players with large contracts. That’s what makes a contract untradeable. It would therefore be ok to pay Earl Watson what the team pays Jerome James even though the latter is untradeable but the former is not. (I’m also eager to see how erasing mistakes is done off the cap considering the Knicks’ cap is still charged with Shandon Anderson and Allan Houston.)

As for the pre-Jordan era, I’m not sure that time frame was a golden era of the functional model (except, as now, for the lucky fans living around Detroit). The championship teams for the prior decade came from Boston, LA, and Philadelphia and each featured one of the ten greatest players ever.

Perhaps the pre-Magic era was the real height of the functional concept, with championship teams bereft of transcendent stars such as Golden State, the Bullets, the SuperSonics, and the post-Russell and pre-Bird Celtics. I’m not sure that this historic example is really relevant nowadays though.

Jordan aside, I think the real reason that the “superstar model” is so popular now is that teams can’t afford more than one or two max-salary players and are usually pressured to pay at least one of their players the max out of fear that he’ll leave. If it’s the right player (Shaq, Duncan), the team has a chance to win the championship. If it’s not (McGrady, Ray Allen), they’re only likely to go a round or two in the playoffs and they’re stuck with the same “superstar” for years.

The Knicks have a fairly unusual situation in that they can afford many “superstar” salaries even if the players aren’t genuine superstars. They can then make them mesh into a functional squad. Of course, this requires the right mix of players and a coach who isn’t a primma donna.

a hard budget (meaning zero growth) is intended precisely to avoid taking on untradeable contracts. I’ll make the argument in the conc. that having lots of money provides real flexibility in really only one area: erasing mistakes; primarily b/c that’s done off-the-cap. So, one or more of those onerous contracts may need to be bought out if they prove impossible to trade. What the Knicks should NOT be doing is adding money and/or years to the cap.
***

I’d written more about Duncan and the Spurs but then deleted it b/c of length. One thing I want to get across is that the functional model has superstars. Its distinction from the superstar model is in how well-defined (or delimited) the superstar’s role is. Duncan, though clearly a superstar, is a traditional F/C. Each player on that team plays a pretty traditional role. That’s the functional model. By contrast, in Minnesota, Kevin Garnett’s role is far less strictly delimited. He does just about everything but sell popcorn.

Admittedly, there is overlap but the categories are really meant to distinguish between pre- and post-Jordan appraoches to building teams. I’m no NBA historian but I strongly suspect that the Jordan Bulls were the first teams built around a player where traditional basketball positional roles were in essence ignored. Not only did their superstar defy convention, so did their role players (even to some extent before Tex brought the triangle). Pre-Jordan the functional model and the style model were really the only games in town.

Whether the functional model works depends a lot on your definition of work. Winning a title may set the bar a bit high. The Jordan era kinda skews everything toward the superstar model but prior to those Bulls teams the functional model was THE way to build a basketball team.