Knicks Morning News (2023.09.07)

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Still, the Knicks’ offer seems to have come out of left field. To sign restricted free agents, teams sometimes must overpay a little to dissuade the original team from matching, but the Knicks went perhaps well above what any other team would pay.

These moves have real consequences, too. As SB Nation’s Tom Ziller notes, Hardaway is set to take up a big portion of the Knicks’ cap, a less-than-ideal move for a rebuilding team like the Knicks.

“Hardaway’s average salary is something like 18 percent of the salary cap,” Ziller wrote. “You can’t be paying a guy who should be your fifth or sixth best player 18 percent of the cap! Math dictates that you don’t do that!”

Additionally, the move also limits the Knicks’ ability to target a point guard, their biggest need on the roster. Currently, the Knicks have second-year guard Ron Baker and first-round pick Frank Ntilikina, neither of whom seem qualified to start. The Knicks renounced the rights to Derrick Rose to sign Hardaway, and few viable options remained on the market after top players and alleged Knicks targets George Hill, Jeff Teague, and Jrue Holiday signed elsewhere.

Hardaway is young enough and skilled enough that he may continue to develop and become more than a solid wing scorer. But once again, one year after signing Joakim Noah to a four-year, $72 million contract, the Knicks have appeared to hand out one of the worst deals of the summer.

In some ways, I think Mills was even more insideous than either Isiah or Phil. He was quieter and probably not as ego-driven, but he just had no idea what the fuck he was doing…and who knows how involved he was in the decisions made when he lurked in the shadows?

After Phil was dumped, he was going to try the hybrid rebuild approach that Leon is executing reasonably well. Yet it was already clear that he had no understanding of either player valuation or how to build a roster where the pieces complemented each other and the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. The quotes in the article above are telling…he would have continued the process of handing out the worst contracts in the league.

I see no reason to credit him for things like acquiring Julius and Mitch, or getting a “decent” return on KP (which I will continue to maintain is not really true…he sold low in the same way that he bought high on THJ, and the reason he sold low was that a) KP demanded out and trashed the FO “from top to bottom” and b) the trade deadline was approaching, but not imminent.) I mean, he used KP to unload his own terrible overpay of THJ!

If he were retained, I have no doubt that we’d be a capped-out asset-starved first round exit clown show at best.

Fred Podesta drafted Willis Reed, who became The Captain of the only two championship teams in Knicks history. His inclusion on the list seems a bit much. If Phil Jackson or Isiah had drafted Nicola Jokic and the team subsequently won two titles, my opinion of them would definitely have been much softer. Alas, Isiah left us with…no one, and Phil left us with…no one. Steve Mills left us with…Mitch, Julius, and picks. None of them are Willis Reed.

First, Patrick Ewing, who was totally washed, requested/demanded a trade, so to just let him expire would have been insulting to your longtime franchise cornerstone. The issue was that Layden took back stupid contracts rather than less poisonous assets; he actually got a couple of firsts back in the deal. Second, if we were truly in “cap hell”, Isiah would not have been able to have made the many horrific transactions he made. A better GM could easily have rectified the damage that Layden caused. Thirdly, the largest component of the cap hell was Allan Houston’s max deal, which was not totally illogical at the time, certainly no more than Amare’s max deal. The McDyess trade was bad on its face but became disastrous because he blew out his knee…had he remained healthy he could have at least been productive, as he was with the Pistons years later even with a compromised knee.

In short, he took over an aging and fragile but still winning team and screwed it up by not having the foresight to go immediately into full rebuild mode. In not doing so, he made several foolish trades and crippling overpays. But the fact that the Marbury and Curry and Crawford and Randolph deals were even possible for Isaiah afterwards suggests that the team wasn’t truly in “cap hell.”

OTOH, Isiah took over an already capped out 37-win team. That was clearly the time to execute a down-to-the-studs rebuild. Instead, he thought he could outsmart everyone by throwing asset after asset out the window and after 5 years didn’t have a single playoff win to show for it. His high-water mark was 39 wins in his first season on the job, and that was with a roster that still had several Layden signees on it. By 2004-05, he had purged the roster of mostly everyone from the prior regimes and from that point on the team topped out at 33 wins for the rest of his pathetic run. It took a massive fire sale to undo the damage he caused, and the fact that we couldn’t really compete with Miami for LeBron was directly attributed to the lasting damage he caused. Throw in the sexual harrassment stuff and I think it’s pretty clear that he was worse than Layden.

As to Phil, I think he was also worse than Layden for sheer clown show reasons.

But again, we’re arguing about which flavor of dogshit is the worst, so whatever!

“Walsh drafted Gallo who is probably one of our 2 best drafted players of the last 20 years.”

Gallo wasn’t that good.

“He drafted Landry Fields who looked like he was going to be pretty good if it wasn’t for some weird nerve injury.”

Landry Fields started to suck well before his elbow injury. The Knicks didn’t bat an eye when he was lost in free agency. Neither did any Knicks fans. BTW he fit right in with this discussion about shitty executives.

Walsh was the Knicks lead executive from 4/2/2008 to 6/30/2011. He squandered nearly every available draft pick in the asset bank in the process of acquiring two faux max players, eventually assembling a final product build around those two, a third actually good signing acquired via the luck of an amnesty clause by Grunwald, some gimmicky scrubs like Novak, Lin, and Fields,, and a rotation filled out with journeymen and washed-up vets. The team did not win a single playoff game during his 3-year tenure. However, his brilliant work was instrumental in building a team that eventually….won exactly one playoff series and two games in the second round in the two years after he left, and zero playoff games in the seven years after that.

Rose took over a team projected to win the fewest games in the NBA. His team made the playoffs in his very first year. In his first 3 years, he assembled a young rotation full of players on no worse (and mostly better than market value deals (except perhaps RJ), retained all future first rounders plus surplus picks, at least three of which are likely to convey as firsts. His product has already won as many playoff games and has gone as far as all of the teams that Walsh can even take partial credit for. If Leon left tomorrow (i.e on the same timetable that Walsh had) the next GM would have among the most favorable situations inherited by a Knicks GM in the franchise’s history.

Walsh was the ultimate merc…he whiffed on LeBron and went all in on sloppy seconds. Leon is in for the long haul and has patiently and conservatively built a sustainable and improvable roster without the ignominity of tanking for several seasons or blowing all the picks. The differences between what the two have accomplished in their 3-year run couldn’t be more stark.