Strat, again I have to clarify that my comment refers to only this year’s stats, which unequivocally favor Mudiay over Frank at this point, even on defense.

I’m not buying any stat that suggests Mudiay is defending better than Frank. The sample has to be too small. The eye test is far from perfect, but imo Frank is defending much better.

Phil inherited a team with multiple missing draft picks and a several players that were immature trouble makers or that wanted out. He decided to blow it up. After seeing how bad they were later after that, he put Melo on the shelf early for surgery in order to bottom out and rebuild with a combination of the remaining 1st round draft pick (that turned out to be Porzingis), anything he could salvage or find in the 2nd round (guys like Early and Ant that didn’t pan out), and a mix of FAs, and Melo.

He did the polar opposite of “blow it up.” He signed its most prominent player to what was at the time the largest contract in the NBA with a full no trade clause.

He proceeded to acquire players who only made sense to acquire if you wanted to try to be good the very next season in Calderon/Dalembert/Seraphin, then Afflalo/Williams the next offseason, and Rose/Lee/Noah the offseason after that.

He NEVER came close to “blowing it up.” He was constantly trying to reach .500 by his own admission to Peter Vecsey. For whatever reason, he viewed .500 as some how vindicating of everything he was trying to do. It speaks to his mind boggling incompetence that he had a very stupid goal (reach .500 no matter the future costs), and couldn’t even reach that relatively-easy-to-accomplish goal.

I’m with you in that I don’t think we should count on Mudiay being our PG of the future either. But he has a much greater chance of becoming a legit NBA PG than Frank does. And that’s not saying much because Frank’s chances are somewhere around the “snowball’s chance in hell” mark, while Mudiay is in the “highly unlikely” range.

At the very least, use the same standard to judge both players and stop with the endowment effect/confirmation bias bullshit.

Missed the game last night. I’m curious how much, if at all, Frank influenced Trae’s poor shooting night.

From casual observation: He was all over him preventing him from being a major part of the action when he was on the court in the 1st half. He got in foul trouble and Trae also did better against him in the 2nd half. Frank looked very good last night, but he missed an easy shot near the rim and had a couple of “Frank being indecisive” TOs.

The KD dream went out the window when Courtney Lee developed neck problems.

Nope. You can stretch Lee, buy out Lance, hold on to the cap holds for Burke and Porzingis, include the cap hold of the #1 pick in the draft, include empty roster slots, and still create a max salary for Durant without having to dump anyone on the roster. Downside is it would leave you only the room exception to split between Vonleh and Trier if you wanted them back.

Alternatively, we could probably attach the two Hornet picks or a deeply protected Knicks future 1st to get another team to take the last year of his contract off our hands and that would leave you with $4.5mm in space to give real contracts to Trier and Vonleh and still use the room if you want to.

The Knicks have a lot of flexibility this summer.