Don’t call the Burke talk optimism, though. It’s pure fantasy. It’s like scratching off only part a match-3 lotto ticket, finding a pair of $20 symbols and going around asking people if they’d pay you $15 for it.

Actually, it’s like watching someone produce a specific way for three months and thinking that it’s reasonable to be cautiously optimistic that he might be able to reach the height he already reached for another three months.

Worst outcome is that he plays like Isaiah Thomas, we win 10 extra games because of him, and we lose him for nothing.

Because the knicks will try to trade him if they think there is a market for him, as they should, and once he becomes available we lose our levarage in any “home town discount” scenario if he doesn’t get moved. This is not an ideal situation to get back a good return because he is expiring. He would have to play extremely well, lo get back any return that exceeds his value to us as a non contending team and other teams know that so they won’t offer much even if he continues to breakout. In all likelihood he is worth a second round pick to someone and we will take it. Which we shouldn’t since we need him.

Attaching him to Lee for space is also questionable, cuz we are gonna waste our cap on Kyrie the injury prone non defense shiny object and/or butler our other shiny object over 30.

Come to think of it, over paying Burke ain’t such a bad outcome.

What I mean by his production is hypothetical is not that he did not produce, he did and very well for a limited amount of games, it’s just that people seem to be guaranteeing he’ll be this guy from now on and that’s a done thing. We haven’t seen him play even a minute yet, we can’t possibly know if he is a solid starter.

Teams trade for expiring contracts, yeah, but my point was more about: for a trade scenario to come up, he has to be good enough to warrant
1) a team willing to trade for him to be sure he’ll be impactful enough even if he bails next season
2) the Knicks not wanting to keep him while he’s playing very well.

Those two scenarios are incredibly unlikely to happen at the same time. If he’s good enough that a team with playoff aspirations is willing to give a pretty good asset for a 6 month rental of him, then why the hell would we be trading this 26 year old dude that’s very fucking good?

This is what I mean when I say a trade is probably absurd to think about. In the scenarios where he doesn’t develop, he won’t have trade value; in the scenarios where he does, why wouldn’t the Knicks just keep him, when he fits a need and is young enough to be promising plus would probably be inclined to re-signed with the team that put him on the map once more?

If you think we shouldn’t hold our breath for a crazy trade offer or sign him to a big contract, sure, I agree. But everything Burke did last year was consistent with who he was initially projected to be as a lottery pick and nothing he posted (other than perhaps an unsustainably high 2ptFG%) is all that far removed from his established skillset. He’s a very skilled ball-handler and passer, and scored reasonably efficiently at all three levels. And he was 25 years old, which is a common age for PGs to turn the corner.