Knicks Morning News (2022.12.07)

Very happy for Judge. No one got more screwed over by MLB’s criminal rookie contract/arbitration system and he risked a ton for this.

Apparently the Yankees are still willing to spend, but I’ll believe that when I see it. I was pretty dispirited about the gulf between the Yankees and the Astros after the ALCS, but if we add Rodon and/or Yoshida I’ll be excited about the 2023 team.

Katz with some scoops: https://theathletic.com/3977210/2022/12/07/knicks-trade-immanuel-quickly-cam-reddish-evan-fournier/

-We’re trying to trade Fournier, but not willing to attach assets just to dump him. We’d potentially take on a worse contract with an asset attached.

-We’re seeking a future first for Quickley. He could be traded with Fournier or alone. He has fans in other front offices.

-No one really wants (Derrick) Rose.

-The chances we recoup the fake-ish first we gave up for Reddish are “slim.” Sounds like a trade of some sort is inevitable.

My feelings on the series of transactions that have led to Cam Reddish being glued to our bench and likely traded for nothing are well-known, so I’ll just add that getting a single first for Quickley would be very disappointing to me considering it would almost certainly come from a decent-to-good team.

I wish we got to see what he could do as 28+ MPG fixture, but we couldn’t largely because that would likely come with some reduction in minutes for RJ Barrett.

Until now the bizarre fixation on making sure RJ got a bare minimum of 32 minutes every night was arguably more or less harmless, but now it might force us to basically sell low on Quickley.

This all screams of very shoddy asset management. These guys are better than Phil Jackson, but still don’t meet the apparently high bar of “uncompensated Knickerblogger poster.”

The whole punting on picks to acquire shittier picks because you think they’re more valuable in a trade thing betrays a lack of confidence in drafting ability.

You know what has really high trade value? Good NBA players. Try to draft them. Even if you fail, we’ve learned the trade value of these punted picks isn’t much anyway because it turns out other teams also understand the concept of pick protection. Isn’t this why we hired Walt Perrin? Am I not told that all is well, because we can always draft a star with one of our mediocre picks?

Of course I’m not against trading out of a draft in a vacuum, all deals come down to the details. But when you’re getting *at best* neutral value for a present pick, there’s a very good chance you’re the sucker.

“You can try and draft good NBA players in 2023, 2024, & 2025 too. There’s no rule against it.”

A lot of these picks come with little to no certainty as to when/if they’ll convey. If the plan is actually to draft players with them, this makes it very hard to do so in a way that is conducive to planning around various contractual timetables.

So much so in fact that it’s hard to believe it’s actually the plan to draft players with them!

“The players they are reportedly are considering trading are Quickley, Fournier, Rose and Reddish. (Notably that excludes RJ and Obi). One was drafted at number 25. If you get a first round pick for him, you basically break even and that’s a good result”

Sorry, but this is not the mentality a team as behind the 8-ball as the Knicks currently are should be employing.

We desperately need to be getting value out of our transactions. In other we words, we need to be *beating* the expected ROI on just about all of our picks, signings, etc. There’s no other way out of middling team hell.

Trading Quickley for another 25th pick does very little for us. It’s basically a concession that we can’t afford to pay one of the few legitimately intriguing players on the team because we paid too many of the un-intriguing players. If the return is actually just a single mediocre first, I’d much rather just accept the latter are sunk costs, pay Quickley, and try to draft more Quickleys.

“I think part of hte problem is past regimes made us suffer for so long that Knicks fans are very impatient for a really good product and they just lump everyone together.”

I would be happy to wait out a plan that took 5 or 7 or 10 seasons to make the Knicks a contender. I’m not remotely impatient.

I just want to see a plan that actually achieves that, or at least has a better chance to achieve that than “commit to mediocrity and hope you get really, really lucky.”

My problem with the current “plan” is not that it’s taking too long, it’s that it’s failing. There’s absolutely no reason to think time will make things better except in the context of simply waiting out all the bad contracts we’ve signed.

We’re already seeing that time can in fact make things worse–we’re probably trading one of our better young players because we failed to capitalize on the advantages provided by his rookie-scale deal.

Why exactly should I believe that it’s literally just a matter of time until we’re a good team? Plenty of NBA teams take long, winding roads to nowhere. Sure seems like that’s our thing.

“Therein lies the problem. When the general consensus is that RJ is the key to not only this season but the general framework to become a contender it gets harder to be optimistic.”

For all of Rose’s moves you can kinda, sorta, perhaps incorrectly say were defensible at the time they were made, extending RJ was an obvious unforced error.

We literally just had to allow him to become a restricted free agent. It was the simplest possible thing to do, and Leon Rose went out of his way to fuck it up.

“I know you saw that a mile away, but RJ’s failure to thrive, so to speak, is a surprise to me and some others here. Obviously it is to Thibs and Rose.”

Oh, I’m not claiming I had any special insight as to RJ’s future. But not giving him $100M+ before he was even approaching “good player” status was a no-brainer. If he went out and killed it, great! We could’ve matched any offer he got, or just given him this contract at that point.

“I bet it’s gonna be a Reddish/Fournier dump to…somewhere? Reddish, Rose, and Fournier for RWB works in the trade machine, fulfilling every KBers nightmare (though I think we’d win that trade even if we included a nominal 2nd.)”

This is going to sound insane but I’m not sure the Lakers do that at this point. Westbrook hasn’t been *terrible* since he started coming off the bench, more run-of-the-mill bad. It wouldn’t shock me if the Lakers prefer him to a pupu platter of players the Knicks don’t want.

Naturally after spending much of the day whining about the terrible state of the franchise, I’ll be at the Garden tonight. Deuce Deuce!

“I swear KBers lack object permanence. If we don’t immediately draft a player then a pick ceases to exist. I guarantee you that these 1sts are written down somewhere and Adam Silver won’t accidentally forget the Knicks traded for it.”

We talk about them all the time! I hope we draft some players with them, but unless/until we do that what do you want people to do, celebrate the great young players we inevitably will draft with these protected picks?

We know the front office isn’t dead set on drafting players with these picks because they’ve already offered them all in a trade. Perhaps their plans have changed, we’ll see, but no one is going to give a front office that has developed a reputation for punting on picks credit for 1) drafting a good player or 2) drafting a player at all with these picks until they actually do it.

Ben, I’m assuming you mean Randle has been our worst defensive player, because ain’t no one coming for RJ Barrett’s crown when it comes to our worst player overall.