Hill has played so few NBA minutes that it’s really hard to say what he is or isn’t. His TS% literally jumped by 9 basis points based on one game.
He’s shown me quite a few glimpses, however fleeting. His jumper is smooth, though woefully ineffective. He finishes pretty well at times, though horrible sometimes too. He’s athletic. I’ve seen good flashes and some horrible flashes. With only 432 minutes under his belt it’s hard to say which will win out. The work ethic is a worry.
22 is not that old. Plenty of guys improve into their mid-20s, David Lee being a prime example (again work ethic is a worry). His upside is not what it would be if he was 19, but that’s purely theoretical upside. You could look at when he picked up the game and his questionable work ethic and either say a. he’s the next Jerome James or b. he’s learning the game and hasn’t matured enough yet to have a strong enough work ethic… once he develops and matures mentally, watch out. There’s a bell curve a player’s career will follow on average, sure, but that tells you next to nothing about any given player.

Again, I don’t think 2-3 mill per year is worth handcuffing yourself in the chase of the guy I think will retire as the GOAT. I would be shocked if Lee’s contract starts at $12 mill and increases annually from there. More likely it will start at $8-10 mill and end up with an average annual salary of $10-12 mill. Locking up Lee would look a lot better now IF he still proceeded to have yet another break out season. Still, given what he knew at the time I think Walsh made the right decision. If some team had made Lee an offer, he would have had a different and tougher decision to make. Worst case it’s a timing problem, and I find it hard to blame an NBA decision maker for not being able to look into the future. Sometimes it looks like they can, but I think that what looks like incredible timing can sometimes also be luck.

I would probably give him a B/B+. He’s cleared the cap for the biggest FA year ever. I don’t know if I would have gone that route or not, but he choose it and went all in. He’s also added/retained some young talent along the way.

Your assessment of the Harrington trade is fair. It might have been wishful thinking that we could have gotten an asset out of Crawford. But on the McGrady trade it sure seemed like Walsh zeroed in on McGrady and then overpaid because he wanted him. History has shown that moving a midsized contract with one extra year for an expiring costs about one late lottery or two late 1st round picks. Hill was a #8 pick so he alone should have been enough. Also Jeffries is not a useless player and is only making a couple million more than his actual value so as long as the expiring contract was a useless player we might have even had to pay less, like just the 2012 pick.

As for Hill I am not hopeful. The knock on him coming out of college is he was an inefficient player and so far in the NBA he is just that. He is not a young rookie so his potential for growth is limited and unlike Douglas, Blair, Lawson or many other rookies he has not shown me the glimse of potential to be anything more than a rotation player at best and I think a top ten pick needs to be more than that, plus his work ethic has been criticized at both places so far.

I would also say that passing up on Lee is looking pretty bad at this point. 2-3 million per is the difference between a good contract and a bad one. We probably could have gotten Lee for a contract starting at 7-8 million, now I would be shocked if his contract starts at any less than 10 and would not be surpirsed if it starts closer to 12.

If Walsh wanted the space he could have traded Lee at the beginning of summer. If he was making 8 million on a five year contract we could trade him for space in a second and probably get an asset in the process. A good player on a good contract is never a bad thing and passing on it so we can have lots of cap room is an unnecessary gamble.

Walsh has not been bad but I would give him probably a C+.

I don’t know what grade I would give Walsh–certainly I don’t think he’s done a perfect job (though I will if LeBron signs with the Knicks)–but I don’t completely agree with your take.

Crawford was traded a few months later and all GS got was two bad players with contracts that expire at the same time as Harrington’s: Speedy Claxton (who has played 44 games in 4 seasons) and Acie Law. Harrington looks like a GREAT haul next to that. If nothing else maybe he could have been traded for a long-term asset before this deadline, as you yourself point out.
The problem with the Knicks taking on any kind of long-term asset at the time of the Crawford-Harrington deal is that every dollar counted. They still weren’t where they needed to be under the cap.
Finally on that deal, Walsh has stated that his goal was to get under in 2010 while being as competitive as possible in the meantime. Harrington was a decent option in that regard. He’s been a strong rotation player for the Knicks. On that goal overall, of course, Walsh has largely failed and the Knicks have mostly stunk.

T-Mac I really have no idea. That was a high price to pay, definitely. Was there another Jeffries offer out there? I have no idea. I never heard any rumors, for whatever that’s worth. Jeffries is not exactly a desirable contract.

Gallo was only the consensus pick because of his link to D’Antoni. That’s why he was going to the Knicks in so many mock drafts.

How can you evaluate Jordan Hill’s career before his rookie season ends?

“He failed to lock up Lee long term last summer which has cost the team millions if they do resign him this year. Or if he has no intention of keeping Lee they failed to maximize his value by trading him before last summer.”

I would assume, for what my assumptions are worth, that Walsh is taking a wait and see approach on Lee. I think that is BY FAR the best way to play it. Is paying 1-4 more million per year to Lee such a high price that you’d sacrifice a shot at LeBron? A shot at LeBron and Wade? I think this is the only way to go. See what LeBron and the other top free agents are thinking once their contracts end, Lee being one of those top free agents.

“He also failed to get any value for Harrington since it is clear he won’t be back next year.”

I think that’s fair. I would have traded Harrington if anything decent was on the table. The only possible justification I can give is that Walsh may have alienated D’Antoni by giving away a player he liked and making him feel like he wasn’t really trying to win now, but even if that’s the case I don’t really agree myself.

“My big concern with Walsh is that he has not shown he puts enough stock in advanced statisitics.”

This is definitely a concern for me. I don’t think it’s a necessity, but I agree that it’s stupid not to take advantage of all available information when making multi-million dollar investments. If he gets LeBron I’m really not worried, but if not then I’m more worried.

He has gotten us cap room but in his desire to get two players he wanted in Harrington and McGrady two of the cap clearing trades were not optimized. I think we could have moved Jeffries for alot less than what we paid to move him if we had not cared about who the expiring contract was. I also think Crawford could have gotten us a long term asset (late first, young player) had we traded him for a poor player with an expiring contract rather than Harrington.

His draft record so far is also okay; Gallo is a good pick (though the consensus pick when Walsh picked him) and Douglas seems to be a great one (considering when they were picked) but Hill was a poor one.

He also has a number moves he failed to do that has hurt the team; He failed to lock up Lee long term last summer which has cost the team millions if they do resign him this year. Or if he has no intention of keeping Lee they failed to maximize his value by trading him before last summer. He also failed to get any value for Harrington since it is clear he won’t be back next year.

My big concern with Walsh is that he has not shown he puts enough stock in advanced statisitics. I think the best GM’s seem to take more of a moneyball approach and anyone with that approach would have seen McGrady as a bad player, Hill as a reach at #8 and Lee as a necessity to lock up long term.

- In two years he has taken us from salary cap hell to the most cap room in the NBA, all without giving up SIGNIFICANT long-term value (ie he kept Gallo and Chandler).
- He drafted Gallinari, who shows glimpses of being a Nowitzki-type talent.
- He spent nothing but Dolan dollars to get Toney Douglas, who looks like a plus defender and at the very least an average combo-type guard on offense. You CANNOT expect anything more out of the #27 pick (you can hope but not expect).
- He traded for low-risk possibly high-reward players like Bill Walker, Giddens, and S-Rod.
- He hired D’Antoni, who despite the last 2 years, is highly respected by the player royalty around the league, making it more likely that we will, indeed, be able to sign players like Lebron/Wade/Bosh.

The cost?
- A mediocre-to-serviceable big man (Hill).
- A pretty good but overpaid defender who is not part of the long-term plan (Jefferies)
- crowd favorite, my wife’s favorite player, but not-part-of-long-term-plan Nate Robinson
- swappage of late-lottery to late-teens draft picks in 2011
- a 2012 1st round pick
- two seasons of suckage instead of two seasons of mediocre-no-chance-of-contention-plus-salary-cap-hell-forever. That’s a wash as far as I’m concerned.

So seriously people, let’s give Donnie a break. He easily deserves an A for his job here. I would’ve liked Lawson also – if he had done that, then he would get an A+ (although we probably would not have room for 2 max FA at this point). Re: Blair – he looks like a nice player, has nice per-36 numbers. But for an inside player he has a relatively average TS (55.6), has a significantly negative +/- (despite being on the floor with Duncan most of the time), and has a TO rate in the Eddy Curry range. Not to mention that his legs may fall off tomorrow.

And Re: D’Antoni — IMO there are two types of good coaches in this league: those who get the absolute most out of no talent (Scott Skiles, for instance), and those who take a good team and make it great (ie. Phil Jackson). He definitely is NOT in the Skiles group, and possibly is in the Jackson group. Losing to the Spurs dynasty is no indictment of his coaching style or skill, especially since it basically happened because of Horry’s mugging of Nash. So I’ll reserve judgment on him until we are, at the very least equally talented as the team we’re playing any given night.

As for drafting either Blair or Lawson, over Hill, well IMHO that seems to be a bit of hindsight at this point.

You should have been here for draft night. ;)

As for drafting either Blair or Lawson, over Hill, well IMHO that seems to be a bit of hindsight at this point. Based on everything I read at the time, Hill was probably the best available player available on the board at that time. Yes, he was considered raw, but basically the so called experts said he had a huge amount of upside potential. From what I have seen from him, I would still agree with that assessment. Yes, in hindsight, it would seem that Lawson would have been a better fit for this team, and maybe Walsh could have traded down to get him, but drafting Lawson at #8 would not have made sense. At the time Hill was rated much more highly.

Yeah, I just react strongly to any critique of the 2009 draft since it was so stigmatized. That’s what I meant by “(maybe more on my side than yours, but who knows)”
Agree that having two of the top 5 picks not play their rookie seasons makes it hard to judge, not to mention that any draft is hard to judge after one season. Could be better than a much more hyped 2008 draft.

I think D’Antoni is a good NBA coach. I’m reacting to the praise he gets and the constant questioning of Walsh’s ability. Still, D’Antoni won over a short time frame with a team that kept it’s core largely in tact and hasn’t proven to be able to effectively adapt his system at all yet (Denver, Shaq, NY…). I think any praise of D’Antoni can only go so far.

“1st coach in the NBA to get back to playing an offensive system and totally move away from the NBA of the mid 90’s to early 2000’s.”

I don’t think this is fair. Geoff Petrie had the Kings built around offense (Adelman as coach) starting in the late 90s. Don and Donnie Nelson were doing the same for Mark Cuban in Dallas around the same time. George Karl had coached some relatively fast paced offensive teams in Seattle during the deadball 90s and was bringing that style to the Bucks in the late 90s. D’Antoni didn’t have a full season in Phoenix until 04-05. Generally, I think the NBA was going in that direction as evidenced by rule changes.
Bryan Colangelo also deserves as much credit as D’Antoni, if not more. How dumb would it be to hire Jeff Van Gundy or Scott Skiles to coach a team with a core of Amare, Marion, and Joe Johnson that was signing Nash and Q Richardson as free agents??? Some people might have done it, but it would be stupid. Colangelo had uptempo offensive talent and hired an uptempo offensive assistant who he then promoted to head coach. Maybe Colangelo got a bit lucky with the way things turned out, but my point is just that D’Antoni might have simply been in the right place at the right time in Phoenix. Replace him with Adelman, Don Nelson, George Karl, Eddie Jordan, etc. and the results might have been just as good or better.
On the other hand, how many NBA decision makers can claim as good a track record as Walsh for as long? He was like the Kobe Bryant of executives in Indiana. D’Antoni is maybe the Amare of coaches at this point, and like Amare we’re waiting to see what he can do without Steve Nash.

I totally agree with your praise of Walsh and his track record, I of course remember his Pacer teams of the mid 90-s to 2000 and was very impressed with the 2004 Pacers team, unfortunately the brawl in Detroit basically ended that team’s run which was sad since that team couldve very easily made it to the Finals in 2005. Of course I think you are a bit way too critical of D’Antoni and dont give him enough credit for what he did with the Suns because he was basically the 1st coach in the NBA to get back to playing an offensive system and totally move away from the NBA of the mid 90′s to early 2000′s.

But like I said if this team struggles next season (even if they dont get Lebron I fully expect for them to at least put a team together talent wise that should be good enough to win close to 50 games and fight for a Top 4-5 playoff seed) than it is totally open season on D’Antoni and cries for him being fired would be totally justified.