now…part of me is probably clouded by that one sequence that we all know about…but whatever they thought they were getting….i think a lot of us knew in those first few months of the season that he wasn’t the pillar that was promised…

Trading a future 2nd rounder 4 years out for Tony Campbell was most likely the absolute best use of what would be the #49 pick in the 1996 draft. He was Minnesota’s leading scorer and a usage soaker. There was no real downside.

Trading a future 1st rounder 3 years out for 33 year old Rolando Blackman was possibly not the best use of a first round asset, but he hadn’t fallen off a cliff yet, and he did make some very important plays during his Knicks tenure.

As for Charles Smith, a lot of you guys reminisce fondly about Xavier McDaniel’s year in NY, but Charles Smith was a way better Knick in ‘93 than X was in ‘92, and Smith was WAY WAY better when he was with the Clips. He wasn’t a merc they were bringing in to net some marginal wins with. He was to be a post scoring pillar of the organization to take the load off of Ewing. Smith had a 110+ TS in LA. He was in his 4th year. That’s the player Checketts and Grunfeld traded for.

If you want to call these trades “whiffs” there has to be an alternative that would have been better. But the list of other players traded for future picks that year doesn’t seem to have many guys on it that would have elevated the Knicks higher than 60 wins and a ECF loss to one of the best teams ever.

Hubert Davis was easily the best Knicks shooter I’d ever seen until Allan Houston arrived, granted the only other candidate would’ve been Trent Tucker. Unfortunately Hubert was just so physically weak defensively.

Do the names Loren Meyer, Amal McCaskill, Constantin Popa, and Geert Hammink mean anything to you? Cause that was the future that was mortgaged for the most wins in franchise history.

It’s not about what the picks turned into. It’s about the fact that we could have done better in trading those picks (and players like Mark Jackson) than we did. And then once we made those deals, it became harder to make additional deals.

They went all-in that summer, rightfully. And Checketts and Grunfeld repeatedly made the wrong choice.

The bigger what if for me will always be do the 1997 Knicks beat the Bulls in the Conference Finals…

I’m still having internal debates with myself over whether rules or “intent of rules” should prevail when being strict about the rules as written is clearly causing an unintended and negative outcome. I’m a rules guy. If the rules suck, fix them, but I still haven’t fully recovered from that series. IMO, that was the best Knicks team of that era.