The reason the Knicks traded Hernangomez was because he’s a young promising player that wanted developmental time, but he was buried on the bench, upset, his agent complained, and he asked for a trade given there was a lot of interest elsewhere.

They could have said “no”, but then Willy and his agent would get pissed off and other players and their agents would see the Knicks burying a promising young guy that many other teams were interested in and hurting his career development. That’s not what you want either.

You can ask why they accepted a Melo deal that included Kanter when they already had Noah, O’Quinn, and Willy, but they were trying to keep Melo happy and get as much back as possible.

You can ask why they were playing O’Quinn when he might be gone anyway. It was because he earned the minutes on merit, was in a contract year, and burying him when he was playing better and in a contract year would have been even a worse look than burying Willy.

Teams have to deal with players, their careers, their families, their agents, the union, the league, and the reputation of their franchise. They can’t just move pieces around based on numbers. They are tying to keep everyone happy while building their team because there are downsides to players and agents hating you.

They have a similar issue with Noah now. They could take a hard line and just tell him stay home so they could potentially use his contract later, but then you are pissing him and his agent off and the rest of the league will see that you have a veteran player totally buried away from the team when other teams want him. That’s not going to make other players, agents or the player union happy either. We are the ones that made the bad deal. We are the ones refusing to play him even in garbage time and are incapable of trading him. But he wants to play and playoff teams want him. So the idea is find something that works for both sides where we save a little money and he gets to play.

Butler’s xray’s apparently came negative, hope it’s nothing as serious as it looked.

Initial X-rays were negative, but we’ll know for sure if they didn’t miss something less obvious tomorrow. Fingers crossed for him.

Butler’s xray’s apparently came negative, hope it’s nothing as serious as it looked.

Yikes, Jimmy Butler with a scary injury. The initial MRI was negative, so maaaaaaaaaaaaaybe it wasn’t a torn MCL/ACL. Here’s hoping!

The Knicks could also buy a second rounder this year to replace the one sent for Mudiay. My complaint, and that of others who argued similarly, is why give anything to take a flyer on Mudiay of all people. I even called it an inconsequential deal, because that’s what it kinda is considering McDermott would not be retained anyway, we’re complaining about the Knicks using any asset to acquire Mudiay because it shows this front office continues to value the wrong things when looking at young players / taking chances on small deals.

Future second rounders are worth considerably less than current year second rounders.

In this instance, the two future seconds combined are probably worth a bit less than the second they gave up to get Mudiay in terms of current trade value.

But yes, in general, seconds tend not to be great assets, which is why I certainly wasn’t freaking about about them dealing one for Mudiay.

However, when you’re a team of little to no assets like the Knicks, you probably should be more careful with your seconds. So it probably wasn’t the best idea to trade one for Mudiay. Not a terrible idea, of course, but probably not the best idea.