What difference does it make whether or not we make the pick as far as the value of the asset is concerned?

Exactly what I said – that WHOEVER IS GETTING THE PICK DOESN’T CARE. Because a deal is almost certainly in place. I think it’s reasonable to think it’s part of a deal for Graham, but it could be some other trade where the extra cap space also made sense.

As for it being collusive, um, not really. Or I guess a more accurate response would be, do you not think that established agents with decades of experience talking to every front office in the league don’t “wink” at each other all the time? That’s why I keep coming back to this: it’s embarrassing how dense people are about how this shit goes down. What’s Leon’s stock in trade? It ain’t drafting. It ain’t team-building. It’s RELATIONSHIPS. Through those relationships, he knows he can trade down and still get the guy his team believes is the best target. Through those relationships he knows he doesn’t have to pay Bobby freaking Portis $15 million. Through those relationships he knows he’ll be able to pick up Burks and Elfrid for peanuts, even though he just cut Elfrid.

So yeah, I think all the negativity is absurd given that you can’t judge the move without context – and since people don’t seem to know what context is, that would be THE OTHER MOVES THEY ARE ABOUT TO MAKE.

If they don’t make those moves, if they don’t sign Graham or swing a trade that includes the Charlotte pick or squeeze a bunch of FAs under the cap without a dime to spare, then I’ll gladly concede I was wrong. But don’t bank on it.

By the way, Z-man, I do think you’re a bit out of line with humper – he actually does admit when he’s wrong, unlike others I could name….

For that reason, i am ready to excuse the 19th pick blunder. It was definitely a mistake, but it may also reflect certain awareness that they did not have enough information to make a worthy pick at that spot. That is obviously a bad look on their scouting, but keeping some of the value in a future 1st might have been better than blindly picking a player.

None of that sounds like much of an excuse. Shouldn’t it be more, “I am ready to not make a big deal about it”? (which, hey, fair enough). Because there sure doesn’t seem to be an excuse for the trade in what you just wrote. It actually makes them sound really quite bad (they didn’t have enough information to make a worthy pick? That does not sound like a thing you should be excusing, if true).

iserp: Well, those projections of future NBA production/value don’t look very good right now with 12 months of additional information. There is still uncertainty, though, but I would not bet on Dotson turning his career around.

Additionally, teams are not graded whether they got their big boards ‘mostly’ right. If they get a mistake somewhere in there, it will be costly. The Knicks could have predicted correctly the production/value of every player in the 2018 draft except they overvalued Knox, and that is what really counts.

For that reason, i am ready to excuse the 19th pick blunder. It was definitely a mistake, but it may also reflect certain awareness that they did not have enough information to make a worthy pick at that spot. That is obviously a bad look on their scouting, but keeping some of the value in a future 1st might have been better than blindly picking a player.

iserp, you are a very respected poster here, and this is a respectful, measured take.

New thread.

http://knickerblogger.net/the-state-of-the-knicks-salary-cap-for-the-2021-free-agent-season/

E, all merc’d out: That’s the “lazy and unprepared” vector. Kind of hard to excuse not having enough information to make a worthy pick at the draft spot you’d known you were picking in for like 6 weeks.

Yes, it looks bad. However, i have come to think a bit about the later stages of the draft, and I see mocks and big boards all over the place. Nobody seems to be consistently right (unless you edit your Big Boards after the fact, like Chad Ford). I think projecting these players is way harder than journalists makes it to be.

In that regard, our FO just fixates on a few players for whom they have lots of information through their connections. I do not like that strategy, but I really can’t argue against it in the later stages of the draft. It seemed to work last year with IQ. Perhaps that strategy is better than having a bit of information about everybody. And it might not be realist that people making the decisions can manage a big amount of information about all the players at the same time.