If the Knicks could get two 2nd round picks for Obi Toppin, they could get a minimum of that much for Grimes.

Um, yeah, two second round picks aren’t gonna be super useful to us given that we’re pretty clearly at the “win now” part of the curve. This whole line of argument does not make a lot of sense to me.

The rest of the league is not focused on what he did in a handful of games where he was basically frozen out of the offense completely by our 3 musketeers of usage. They know what Grimes is capable of. He’s a young lower usage 3&D rotation player with some upside.

It was pretty clear that the Knicks were shopping Quentin Grimes. I’m not aware of them turning down a better package than what they got. It seems what is going on here is that some KBers have a bad case of the endowment effect with Quentin Grimes, which was thankfully not the case with Leon Rose. We had a relatively similar player to Quentin Grimes named Miles McBride who we just extended on a very cheap contract to play the not-very-pivotal “low usage bench guard” role.

We had months of whining over rolling out 1st round picks that at worst lost a couple of pennies on the dollar to gain better long term trade positioning, but people are being very accepting of this trade as a good deal when at imo it deserves a lot more scrutiny by “long term” thinkers.

The “long term thinking” part of developing the roster is over. We should be looking to win as much as possible this year, and next year. It is clear that if we get healthy, we can do some serious damage. At full strength we are an actual contender. Grimes was redundant with the other bench pieces we have at full strength. The bench was far too defense-oriented. We swapped out one of our many low-usage defense-oriented players for a guy who can actually create some of his own offense (Bojan) and another guy who can still shoot the 3 quite well and get his own shot off in Alec Burks. Burks has not looked great so far, but Bogdanovic’s shooting would probably come in handy if we could ever get back to somewhere near full strength.

We may not get back to full strength this year. Hell, we *probably* won’t. It was still worth upgrading the bench, because even at full strength our bench before the trade COULD NOT SCORE. Like, not even a little bit. It was Miles McBride, Josh Hart, Quentin Grimes, and Precious Achiuwa. That bench unit ain’t scoring shit on anybody.

Bojan Bogdanovic can throw the ball into the basket. That matters. Our rotation is a mess right now because everybody is hurt, but the players we have make perfect sense if we ever get through the injuries. Again– that might not happen!

But I’m willing to pay the opportunity cost of Quentin Grimes’ upside. Not seeing Quentin Grimes’ upside is something I’m willing to live with. I don’t personally believe there is very much there.

So basically, at a minimum we gave up four 2nd round picks for two old guys.

Bojan is a bad defender. He will get targeted in the playoffs.

Burks looks like his days of doing anything other than spot up 3s on offense are close to over and his best days as a defender may also be behind him.

It’s not about Grimes.

We had months of whining over rolling out 1st round picks that at worst lost a couple of pennies on the dollar to gain better long term trade positioning, but people are being very accepting of this trade as a good deal when at imo it deserves a lot more scrutiny by “long term” thinkers.

To be clear, I don’t totally hate the deal. Maybe there are teams out there that will actually value and want Bojan next year for more than just salary filler. I just would not have done this deal.

We are not overrating Grimes. He was a very good player last year and after struggling for the first two months of this season was playing better in January.

Even if Bojan or Burks are as good or better, they are not in my opinion, it doesn’t matter because Thibs is willing to start Grimes and seemingly unwilling to start them. If we want a fourth or fifth option who plays defense and cannot be abandoned at the 3 point line Grimes is better than anyone on this team outside of Brunson, DDV, OG, and Randle.

Grimes would have been better spent on getting us a competent backup PG, and Bojan wasn’t worth bringing in.

You’re assuming that Quentin Grimes had a bunch of value. That’s a pretty big assumption.

Who was this competent backup PG that we were supposed to acquire for Quentin Grimes? Seems like the Knicks shopped Grimes around pretty hard and the offers were not all that great.

Burks is trusted to run backup PG, but he sucks ass at it. Bojan is a good enough scorer to start and give Brunson some spacing, but that doesn’t seem to be on the table, and getting Fournier’d seems like a more likely outcome.

Grimes would have been better spent on getting us a competent backup PG, and Bojan wasn’t worth bringing in. If he only plays 19mpg even with our entire starting front line injured, he’ll be the new Fournier when they’re back. We turned a dime into what for us is turning out to be a nickel, regardless of whether it’d be a quarter for another team.

and a sample size of one eye test tells all…

Feelings, nothing more than feelings
Trying to forget my feelings…

You can fool a lot of people I guess if all you do is stand in the corner and wait for somebody to pass you the ball, only shooting it if there’s nobody within a mile of you, then not even being particularly good at that.

We coulda been something if only we had Quentin Grimes!

Sigh.