News & Blogs
Saturday Posted & Toasted Notes: Big Penguin sighting, Rich whiteboards, Kuz bomb – Posting & Toasting
Sources: Andre Drummond reaches 1-year, $3.9M deal with Knicks – ESPN
Knicks to sign veteran Andre Drummond to replace Mitchell Robinson: Sources – The Athletic – The New York Times
LeBron James’ agent Rich Paul says star would’ve signed with Knicks if they didn’t win NBA title – SNY
Rich Paul Says LeBron James Would ‘Be Going to the Knicks’ If They Hadn’t Won NBA Title – BleacherReport
Knicks, Andre Drummond agree to one-year deal – SNY
Knicks sign veteran big man Andre Drummond to one-year deal – Posting & Toasting
Knicks Sign Andre Drummond – Knick of Time
KNICKS ARE NBA CHAMPIONS!!! | KFS Faculty REACTS to the first NBA Title in 53 Years! – Knicks Film School
LeBron James’ Shocking Comment About Joining The Knicks! | CP The Fanchise & Alan Hahn React – Knicks Fan TV
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111 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2026.07.05)”
He’s really special, it’s so so good that he’s ours. 🧡💙
That’s amazing. Between that and KAT going out of his way to let fans touch the Larry O’Brien trophy in the immediate aftermath of Game 5, and at the parade, we’ve got a bunch of guys on this team who get what it means to the people who love the team.
The whole blood in the ground thing, we scoffed, but no one is laughing now. With Jose and Kat in particular, you are hitting two pretty key New York demos very directly. This team has connected with this city, the whole region, so perfectly.
I have made my peace with Drummond, who I definitely thought was one of the elite players in the NBA during my Wins Produced phase. I think he and David Lee were the two guys who disabused me of my belief in it. He is just a terrible defender, despite a 7’6 wingspan.
Still, I was complaining about our lack of beef and Drummond is probably the biggest, most NFL-esque, body in the NBA. He makes prime Oak and Mase look small.
And I can’t seriously say I am going to miss Huk’s defense, although I guess it was a thing. He was so inept on the other end of the court it was hard to watch.
I’m ok with Drummond, for now. I don’t understand why we’re all worried about who we’ll sign to play backup C when the season is long and opportunities can (and most likely, will) arise. We have until the trade deadline to solve this.
“We have until the trade deadline to solve this.”
Maybe even after if someone gets waived!
We do need a third string center, though. You can’t get to the trade deadline with just two, especially when OG and Mo are our only other tall-ish guys.
Kyle Kuzma went on a social media diatribe about the salary cap. He starts by saying the following:
To me, the salary cap itself has always seemed like a blunt instrument rather than a surgical tool. If the primary goal was to prevent “super-teams” from forming, especially in big-market teams with super-wealthy ownership, and the secondary goal is to equitably distribute both revenue and access to talent, there must be a better way to do it.
I still think (hope?) that will eventually be Drummond. I can’t imagine that Brown is comfortable having someone with Dre’s glaring defensive liabilities holding down the #2 spot for the entirety of the season and into the playoffs.
Reports are that Leon has made overtures to at least one team (Pels) seeking a trade for a #2 center and that the talks went nowhere. That search is likely still ongoing only now, with Drummond in the fold, Leon no longer has to shop hungry.
I’m sure there will be some no-name brought in on a 2-way as a third big body while Leon continues to shop. Probably shortly after the conclusion of Summer League.
Yeah, of course. But there’ll be players cut after training camp, there’s players out of the league than can be a 3rd stringer C… Mo Bamba is only 28 and is free. He’s from Harlem, btw.
What i’m saying is that we don’t need a good solution to this problem until the trade deadline (and the waiver wire after that, like Z-man said), we just need a placeholder while we’re ready to strike when a good solution becomes available.
Edit: A good solution for backup C, i mean, Drummond is not it and he’ll be the 3rd stringer when Leon solves this.
The #1 purpose of any salary cap is to keep labor costs in check. The parity justification has always been BS.
The Times had a piece last month reporting that MLB owners are unhappy that the value of their franchises are not appreciating at the same rate of increase as those of the other major sports. The reason, they believe, is that the other leagues do a much better job of capping salaries than MLB does. That’s why they’re drawing a line in the sand. The whole “bring the Dodgers to heel” thing is just a red herring.
Mitch finally revealing how he broke his hand
https://heavy.com/sports/nba/new-york-knicks/mitchell-robinson-finals-injury-truth/
I like Bamba. Is he that much worse than Huk?
Kuzma clearly listened to the Simmons pod.
I have thought for years that the salary cap system isn’t finegrained enough. A lot of guys get max contracts they don’t truly deserve.
Like with KAT, who I now love like a brother. But giving him a supermax top of the scale deal going into his thirties, it makes no sense.
All these giant contracts going to 30 year olds make no sense.
Glad Mitch’s brother is okay (assuming so otherwise Mitch would’ve mentioned it). Always thought it involved a truck. Hope the truck is okay.
Yeah, under the circumstances I understand why this happened. And am glad the brother made it.
The #1 purpose of any salary cap is to keep labor costs in check. The parity justification has always been BS.
labor costs are separately negotiated at 51% of the cba. all the cap rules could scale up or down if it was 70% or 30%. the cap and its thicket of rules are trying to solve an incredibly complex optimization problem subject to goodhaet’s law with inherent underlying utility trade offs. you can see it front and center in the kuzma critique, which complains about both the loss of team continuity and the impediments to player movement in the same sentence. a more fine grained cap rulebook is highly unlikely to fix some of the moles that emerge like without similar-sized moles popping up. most pareto optimal improvements are likely to be the opposite direction of relaxing constraints. there are lots of good suggestions for improvements but it’s not all about salary suppression and the problem is hard.
easy to root for mitch on a personal level…no doubt though I am gonna catch an unpleasant feeling anytime I see him in a celtic uniform…
“Mo Bamba is only 28 and is free. He’s from Harlem, btw.”
Mo Bamba might be my worst draft day take ever…though he’d be generational talent…instead he’s hanging on to an NBA career by his fingernails. He’s like a cigarette boat with a 10hp motor.
But hey, why not?
This blog is so addictive. I just can’t stop. Around this time of year it’s perfect. I am glad I didn’t follow through the season and the playoffs, though. I was able to suspend disbelief and it paid off. I believed all through game 4.
It’s a point I’ve tried to make here and it’s always crickets. Statistics create the illusion of forgone conclusions. We should be looking for anomalies.
No one could have predicted Landry Shamet shooting 91% on threes against Cleveland. This is why you watch. For the unexpected.
Rather than predict doom and gloom with Mitch gone, there are now a fresh set of possibilities moving forward. He was very good in some ways but horrible in others. His explanation of the hand injury, though I feel bad for him, is actually a good reason not to give him 47 million dollars. This is how he responds to stress?
Maybe Drummond pulls a Landry. How good could he be within our immaculate team culture?
never minded the notion of bringing on more localized talent on to the team…the phrasing of the notion with the word “blood” or whatever seemed overly dramatic and odd…
really liked how drummond expressed his feelings on coming to the knicks, with a clear understanding of the expectations for this particular market…
he too is a tri-state kind of guy…
Mitch signed with the fucking Celtics. He’s pretty much dead to me.
I understand that folks here will feel differently and wish him the best and always root for him. Not me. Sorry big guy, you’re wearing the uniform of Z-man’s most hated sports franchise.
howdy danvt, hope your day is well, music and life are good, and you are enjoying that gorgeous spot you live in for us all…
was going to mention this earlier, but since you’ve brought it up – will say the off season is truly my favorite time of year here at KB…
with the season over and months away from our team taking the court again I really enjoy seeing what people have to say when there’s not much to say…
the whole thread each day becomes nothing but filler…true test for folk’s creativity and imagination…
see who sticks around and what folks are working with…nice…
let the fun begin…
And I’m not blaming Dolan or anyone else for Mitch’s career choices. I respect Mitch for taking his bag, but it was his choice for taking it from the team that most Knicks fans despise the most.
Sadly, there was a very good chance that his jersey was headed for the rafters if he stayed. Doesn’t seem even remotely possible now.
I share you sentiment 100% z man. I hate the Celtics. And Mitch is dead to me.
and, not so secretly looking forward to hearing of any vacation plans you may have in store z-man…
can’t tell you how much I lived through you stories vicariously last year (I think that’s when you went to that beautiful all-inclusive spot)…
hope all of you keep living life to the fullest, and I get a chance to enjoy your adventures a bit…
Sup Geo. Love your posts. Yeah life is good. Hope yours is as well. This site is perfect in July. Immediate news updates. Trusted opinions. Shared obsession with this team.
Mitch is never going to be dead to me.
He wrote it with Chat GPT, it’s a bunch of slop.
Celtic fans are going to be merciless about the free throws. We love/d Mitch. Warts and all. They don’t.
Kuz’s confused, likely LLM generated take aside, my main gripe with the current CBA is it seems to “solve” a problem no one thought was actually a problem—the ability of great teams to retain their existing players. Before this CBA was implemented, I don’t think I had ever heard someone complain that it was too easy to do that.
I can understand wanting to prevent an MLB like system, in which disparities in owner wealth and a theoretically unlimited cap can allow a few teams to sign a wildly disproportionate number of the best free agents. We can argue about the ethics of preventing that, but it’s not hard to understand why it rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
What I don’t understand is disincentivizing existing teams from staying together if they otherwise would want to for basketball reasons. Any team that cobbles together a bunch of undervalued players, be it through the draft or through Leon-like headhunting of undervalued NBA talent, will eventually run up against the second apron. The undervalued guys will cease to be undervalued.
Incentivizing the break up of these teams seems like a misreading of what caused the relative lack of parity in the recent past, which was caused by black swan free agent movement e.g. LeBron to the Heat and KD to the Warriors. I don’t think anyone thought it was “unfair” that teams could keep their existing cores together. No one thought the Spurs of the aughts and ‘10s were a super team ruining the sport.
It’s quite possible this is all just sour grapes after losing both iHart and Mitch to CBA mechanics, but I’d like to see the next CBA have some kind of incumbent core protections.
i don’t think turning on mitch because he chose his best situation when the knicks refused to pay him market value makes you guys bad people. it had to be something else.
This doesn’t really check out. Was Mitch supposed to pass on $47M for whatever we could cobble together under the second apron? Fuck James Dolan for interfering with the basketball decisions of the front office and breaking up a championship team.
Are the Dodgers really “ruining baseball,” though? That’s the oft repeated justification put forth by MLB owners in their push for a cap. Yeah, LA has won the past two titles but had it not been for one uncommonly poor defensive half inning by the Yanks & a last gasp tying homer by Miguel Rojas(!) against the Jays, they could have easily been 0-2 in those Series.
I find claims of the Dodgers corrosive effect on the sport to be wildly overstated. Savvy execs like Peter Neander and Billy Beane have shown it possible to field a competitive product with fewer resources in an uncapped world. I suspect someone like Sam Presti would enjoy similar success running a small market team in an NBA with fewer salary constraints on the big $ clubs.
“Fuck James Dolan for interfering with the basketball decisions of the front office and breaking up a championship team.”
Sorry does not compute and I hate Dolan. He is the owner and by definition controls the amount spent, like every owner. He put a cap on that amount (more than last year and likely top 3-5, and not on whom). That is not interfering with “basketball decisions”. Keeping the starting 5 intact is not “breaking up a championship team” by letting the FO (not Dolan) decide how to replace a rotation player, albeit with limited financial resources.
I’m proudly wearing my blue Mitchell Robinson 23 jersey today. Will probably retire it by the time the season starts, though.
As an aside, I think in a very short amount of time the Celtics will be seen as the biggest winners of the NBA offseason. They’re a much better basketball team than they were last year, and I expect them to be the 1 seed in the East (if only bc Mazzulla is a Thibs clone and they’ll try much harder than anyone).
But most importantly, in one year that George contract is going to be gold. I’ll bet you right now when Ant is disgruntled next summer and asks out of Minnesota, that contract will be the matching salary that gets him to Boston.
Yeah sorry but this makes no sense.
This is a basketball decision:
1. Go into the second apron to bring back a team that just won the NBA championship, or
2. Hope for some sort of Andre Drummond renaissance
It absolutely fucking IS a basketball decision. James Dolan saying no to the second apron means choosing door #2. He made the decision that winning another ring doesn’t matter as much as avoiding narcissistic injury. Which is a basketball decision.
“This doesn’t really check out. Was Mitch supposed to pass on $47M for whatever we could cobble together under the second apron? Fuck James Dolan for interfering with the basketball decisions of the front office and breaking up a championship team.”
No, he wasn’t “supposed to” do anything. But he did have choices, and the choice he made has consequences attached. all choices involve consequences. He chose to leave to get a bag that wasn’t available to him here, but he could have stayed if he wanted to. If he was traded, I would feel at least somewhat differently, although probably not much.
I have nothing against Mitch personally. But this is sports fandom. My love or hatred for player in the context of being a sports fan is nearly entirely dependent on the jersey a player dons. I will always root against the success of anyone who wears a green jersey while they wear it. I will always root for the success of any player who wears a Knicks jersey, no matter how much the insufferable Dolan benefits from that success. This is with the underlying assumption that how I personally feel about a team or player has absolutely no bearing on how things pan out.
I love Mitch. Monogamy is for the birds.
wait a minute now, thought I was the only one here able to judge others harshly…hey now, come down off that high horse of yours and come mire yourself in the morally murky mud the rest of us are enjoying…
and, for the record, I almost always give your posts a thumbs up, so don’t let anyone else here fool you in to thinking they might love you more than me…
shoot, look closely and that’s milo’s meadow in my profile pic…
“Yeah sorry but this makes no sense.
This is a basketball decision:
1. Go into the second apron to bring back a team that just won the NBA championship, or
2. Hope for some sort of Andre Drummond renaissance
It absolutely fucking IS a basketball decision. James Dolan saying no to the second apron means choosing door #2. He made the decision that winning another ring doesn’t matter as much as avoiding narcissistic injury. Which is a basketball decision.”
It was a business decision. So was Mitch’s decision. Basketball is a business. Dolan probably thought (smartly or stupidly, businesswise) it was bad business to go into the second apron and pay $50M per year for $15M worth of Mitch. Mitch thought it was bad business for him to get paid $10M for $15M worth of league value. That’s how business works.
I have never gotten off on telling ultra-rich folks what they should do with their money, especially when it comes to luxury tax. If Dolan didn’t want to pay additional luxury tax and risk future constraints for the sake of improving his team’s chance of repeating, that’s his call. He doesn’t owe any of us a fucking thing. And neither does Mitch. Whatever.
Mitch is a bit mercurial. And a major injury risk. And his strengths and flaws are well defined by all here. I won’t rehash them. I truly believe if the brain trust (Leon, WWW, et al) and the player leadership (Brunson and the other starters), all put pressure on ownership to go over the second apron to keep the band together. The band would be together. No matter how stubborn we think guitar jimmy is. That these things didn’t happen, also speaks volumes to me. Even championship teams change around the edges. You cannot remain still. I think Leon will make more small moves and perhaps even bigger ones around the trade deadline (packaging deuce and picks, etc.).
I read WWW as world war wee
The idea Mitch should have given up 22 million seems wild but whatever
“i don’t think turning on mitch because he chose his best situation when the knicks refused to pay him market value makes you guys bad people. it had to be something else.”
Nah, lining Dolan’s pockets with my unconditional fandom is what makes me a bad person. Or at least a wretched addict in the grips of his despicable pusher. “I love you baby, can I have some more? Ooh, ooh, the damage done…“
Listen, if James Dolan took the money given to him by Knicks fans and used it to re-sign Mitchell Robinson and make the Knicks as good as possible, he might not have enough left over for the real essentials, like building an unprecedented surveillance apparatus he can use to harass people he doesn’t like.
Mitch definitely should have taken the bag. That goes without saying. Good for him. My point is the Knicks didn’t have the political willpower to make the push into the second apron. They didn’t have the internal political willpower. And that says something to me. I’m sure the players are fond of Mitch. But can it be grating that he shoots 20% from the free throw line? Can it not sit well with ultra competitive alpha dogs that he punched his truck on the even of nba finals? Yes and yes. Is he ultra valuable particularly to the Knicks due to his elite offensive rebounding and rim protection? Yes. Is Dolan a schmuck? Yes . Do I root for laundry? Yes. All things can be true.
“The idea Mitch should have given up 22 million seems wild but whatever”
No one is suggesting that he should have. Only that his choice not to has consequences. He made the best business decision for himself, indeed, a no-brainer, financially speaking. But it came at the cost of his legacy as a Knick, for a lot of us at least. To each their own!
On that note, did Brunson give up $100M or not? Was that the right business decision? Do you think he regrets it?
“Listen, if James Dolan took the money given to him by Knicks fans and used it to re-sign Mitchell Robinson and make the Knicks as good as possible, he might not have enough left over for the real essentials, like building an unprecedented surveillance apparatus he can use to harass people he doesn’t like.”
I know, I too am shocked, shocked that Dolan is a corrupt, insufferable asshole who doesn’t give a single fuck about what Knicks fans who he can revel in mocking while they mindlessly line his pockets think! Who would have known before this?!
Seems like we’re getting into semantics here, but rather obviously the “business decisions” have a lot of overlap with the “basketball decisions.”
Dolan decided that winning was less important than his bottom line. That’s his choice to make. Fair enough.
I’m gonna go ahead and blame the guy who made that choice instead of the guy who decided not to play for 25% of his market worth.
I’m partial to the sentiments in the first sentence, but the reality of the American labor market is that places like Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City really can’t compete with places like San Francisco and New York City for top grade talent — be it in something like law, or in something like basketball.
Lawyers don’t get drafted and forced to work in a market they don’t want to work in; neither do European soccer players. That the starting point for any discussion about “fairness” or “justice.”
And there is at least some level, a revenue play, not just a cost play, to be able to market “fair competition” to the masses. Does the closed shop NBA generate more revenue net-net than an open shop “American basketball market,” where you’d have five or six basketball teams in NY as London has ca. 15 soccer teams, would? Hard to say. But what’s clear is that the real “free market” is Europe and not the US.
“Dolan decided that winning was less important than his bottom line. That’s his choice to make. Fair enough.”
This boils things down to a binary choice for the sake of a narrative. I’m sure you know that it’s not quite that simple.
“I’m gonna go ahead and blame the guy who made that choice instead of the guy who decided not to play for 25% of his market worth.”
I’m gonna go ahead and not really blame anyone, or at least not to a degree that it matters all that much to me. The bottom line for me is that we just won a championship (and a particular decision that Dolan made that went against the “basketball people” might have made all the difference in that happening, unless you think that Thibs should have been retained rather than Dolan choosing to throw away tens of millions on his just-inked extension) and even with the loss of Mitch we have a very good chance of repeating. The Thibs thing contradicts the notion that “winning was less important than his bottom line.” He was fine with paying a fired coach top dollar, clearly because he prioritized winning over his bottom line.
So this is not about how Dolan prioritizes “winning” in general, is it? Of course not. It’s about how he interprets the consequences of going into the second apron, and its impact of sustaining this level of winning over an extended period. I don’t claim to know all the nuanced discussions/opinions involved in his interpretation. Is it more about Mitch himself? Would (will) Dolan feel the same way about losing Brunson, or KAT, or OG as a second apron casualty? Is there a sincere belief that going into the apron to keep Mitch this year jeopardizes the rest of the core in the next 3 years unless he agrees to pay $100Ms in taxes to keep in intact, along with other consequences?
Personally, I think Dolan has many glaring flaws in his decision-making as it relates to winning, but not caring about winning solely because it costs too much doesn’t seem to be one of them.
I’ll even go as far as to say that Dolan is among the least frugal owners in the NBA, and this is part of what rankles Knicks fans the most…that he’ll burn tens of millions on coaches and executives and pay luxury taxes year after year, so when he says no to something (especially out of spite, like with Jeremy Lin) it’s that much more offensive.
Come on fellas. Do you think the CFO of Pfizer, or GM or Coca Cola gives two fucks on a rainy day about you? Dolan is a business man. He screwed his own daddy out of control of daddy’s company. He cares not a whit about the fan. Whatever direction he thinks is going to make him the most money is the way he’s going to go.
The fan is at an emotional disadvantage because the word fan denotes an irrational attachment to something. If you don’t like what Coke does to Coke Zero, you can buy Pepsi. The fan can’t swap fandom that easily.
The whole thing was collectively bargained between the 2 sides. Everyone understands the framework.
Most businessmen are going to react the way Dolan has. Dolan was a corrupt insufferable putz before he decided to pinch pennies to maximize his bottom line not resigning MR. What do you expect from a pig but a grunt.
The Walmart folks who have plenty of money made the same type of decision after their win with Denver a few years back. Billionaires are hard wired to maximize profit. They mostly are going to try to do that every time.
No surprises here.
I would also suggest that there is a lot of spite embedded in the decision…even if he might have made it anyway strictly on his interpretation of the merits.
Dolan is a reviled figure in the Commisioner’s office, and by extension, in the governor’s club, and he despises all of them. I would think that he knows he owns the most valuable team in the NBA, and one that generates more revenue for the league than any other team. He knows that any tax dollars he pays goes back to the league and is divvied up among other owners, on top of getting the shit end of the revenue-sharing stick. So even if he didn’t make the decision solely or even partially out of spite, there is probably some satisfaction in knowing that he is sort of sticking it to them.
Well, he took the max extension as soon as we made it available for him, which is not exactly giving up $100M, just ask Isaiah Thomas.
Generally true, but in this particular instance if Dolan wanted to maximize profit, he’d tell the FO to get the payroll below the tax threshold, so he could avoid the repeater tax. Plus going over the SA isn’t a force multiplier to your tax bill and so there’s no reason to care about it per se, if all you want to do is max profit.
It’s of course possible that Dolan wants to maximize profit, but can’t even do that sensibly or competently. That would be entirely on-brand.
“Well, he took the max extension as soon as we made it available for him, which is not exactly giving up $100M, just ask Isaiah Thomas.”
Well this suggests that Brunson lied about his reasoning. He said that he did it so that management would have more flexibility in building a contender. He made no mention about worrying about the risk of waiting. I’m guessing that there are examples of guys who waited for the bigger payday beyond Isaiah Thomas.
And?
Well I do think we have reached a sort of consensus here. We’re all in agreement that James Dolan is an insufferable mediocrity of a nepo moron who should be fired into the sun on some sort of rocket. There’s some nuance in our varying opinions but we’re pretty much all on the same page when it comes to the big picture.
Fuck that guy.
don’t know much about him, but hoping quintin does well over seeing the rangers…
I’m ready for the devil (maybe, maybe not) we don’t already know…
If we were talking about a player with a lesser reputation for integrity and humility, it would not matter in the least. Nor would it have mattered if he simply said something vague, like “We felt it was the best way to go…” or even something more candid, like “You never know what can happen with injury…”
But he specifically referenced the added flexibility it gave management to build a team around him. It would be kind of disingenuous to suggest that if it had nothing to do with his decision. The media picked up that narrative and ran with it, turning him into some kind of folk hero….when it was rightly pointed out that no one said that about Julius Randle when he did exactly the same thing a couple of years earlier.
Brunson has recently tried to walk that narrative back, so I give him credit for that. But he still holds on the the notion that he “sacrificed” for the team. Here’s a quote from February:
These statements seem pretty contradictory to me. Not that I care in the least, I absolutely love the guy! But if he did it out of security, you did not sacrifice for the team. You took the less risky move.
Most loathsome owners to win a championship:
Marge Schott
James Dolan
Art Modell
Harold Ballard (Maple Leafs)
Who said the Knicks offered Mitch $10M?
“Well I do think we have reached a sort of consensus here. We’re all in agreement that James Dolan is an insufferable mediocrity of a nepo moron who should be fired into the sun on some sort of rocket. There’s some nuance in our varying opinions but we’re pretty much all on the same page when it comes to the big picture.
Fuck that guy.”
Well, yeah, 1000%. But that’s hardly news, is it? I mean, has anyone softened their opinion on Dolan in the last 20+ years?
These latest transgressions are a mere reminder of what we all knew all to well all along. If anything, we should still be in utter disbelief that the championship happened in the first place, and that he made two of the most important decisions that led to it (hiring Leon, firing Thibs). In the grand scheme of things, I’ll take it.
If the reasoning is that he could grab the bag later, by that same reasoning he will grab the missing fifth year later, so he gave management more like $40 million (or about 20% less). Which hey, it is awesome, but it is unfair to subject everyone to the same standard, and much more unfair to change the standard for Mitch to take 50% less of his market value.
“Who said the Knicks offered Mitch $10M?”
I’m using a ballpark figure of what Mitch theoretically could have been offered while staying under the second apron. The amount is irrelevant. Sure, maybe the media reports were wrong and there wasn’t a negotiation at all. But based on everything I had read, it did seem like there was a price that Leon would have paid to bring him back, and the numbers thrown around were somewhere in the $8-12M range.
Of course, that would have forced guys like Shamet and Jose to make their own business decisions. Shamet seems like a guy who very likely could have gotten several million more that he signed for. Maybe Alvarado too. Not as much more as Mitch, but still.
And with that said, it is not the end of the world. We just had the most amazing season, we still have our starting lineup that has been great, and I am sure that Leon will find a very good C to play for us.
But it is the time of the year that we moan that the FO could have done better, specially if it was Dolan meddling with our offseason.
Dolan’s 2nd apron warning, Mitch’s cut and JBrown’s trade seem more like early signs of a newly nba owners lobby policy than personal decisions on roster building and money investment.
Can’t speak for the “we,” but I *am* still in utter disbelief that it did. The guy’s a joke. But even a joke can bumblefuck into something good if he lasts 27 years.
Bad process, bad reasoning, good result on Thibs.
As to Leon, much credit due for him and his Rolodex executing well on a silly organizational strategy put in place by Dolan. Strategically, they (*) hit on 16 with the dealer showing 10, drew a 5, the dealer went bust and it worked out. Even *that* only worked because Brunson massively outperformed market consensus. Make him an *actual* 4/104 player, and they don’t sniff the LO’B.
But who cares? Very deserving fanbase got very deserved championship. Kind of speaks for itself.
(*) Note the “they,” here. Leon didn’t necessarily hit on 16 of his own accord although, who knows, maybe he did. But it doesn’t matter. They’re hanging a banner.
The most we could have offered after we signed Alvarado and Shamet was around $4M. Seems pretty relevant.
It’s not even clear the Knicks even made him an offer. Much like Saquon Barkley, you can’t come back if they don’t ask.
“If the reasoning is that he could grab the bag later, by that same reasoning he will grab the missing fifth year later, so he gave management more like $40 million (or about 20% less). Which hey, it is awesome, but it is unfair to subject everyone to the same standard, and much more unfair to change the standard for Mitch to take 50% less of his market value.”
I think you are missing my point. I am not holding anyone to any standard, nor criticizing them for any business decision that they make. I even called what Mitch did a no-brainer business decision! Good for him! But he’s a Celtic now and I hate the fucking Celtics, so whatever. Enjoy the money! You deserve it! I hope your team sucks and don’t care much (beyond tragedy that transcends sports) how it happens or what that means for you! Unless you somehow return to the Knicks, or in the rare instance that you are playing against a team I want you to beat (Hi, Wemby!) I will always love what you accomplished here, but will never root for you again.
As to Brunson, he did exactly the same thing that Randle did, for the same exact reasons. Yet the narratives are quite different. Personally, I don’t care much about such things. I just don’t think the “sacrifice” narrative is justified, and I think Brunson did nothing to counteract it (if anything, he encouraged it.) But does it make me feel any differently about Brunson? Absolutely not.
Kings were looking at Duren right?
Any chance we can bring back the big sneeze if they get him? Achiuwa would be a pretty good fit I think, no?
Some social media chatter about 1)The Kings potentially releasing/buying out DeMar, and 2)DeMar then coming here. Thoughts? He’d expect more playing time than Clarkson got. And he doesn’t solve our size problem, even if he can play PF. But he’d be the instant offense guy that Clarkson never quite turned out to be.
“The most we could have offered after we signed Alvarado and Shamet was around $4M. Seems pretty relevant.”
Alvarado and Shamet were signed after it became clear that negotiations with Mitch were going nowhere. Shamet agreed to delay his player option decision to buy time for management to figure things out. It was an open question whether Alvarado would have exercised his player option without a longer term deal, and it was widely reported that it was pretty likely that had he opted out he could have gotten more money elsewhere.
So the disconnect seems to be that the amount Mitch could have been offered prior to Shamet and Alvo agreeing to terms is more that it was afterwards. I’ll leave it to you to verify that there was a lot of discussion about the max that the Knicks could offer Mitch in the event that Shamet was let go, Alvo declined his player option and signed elsewhere, and all remaining salaries were vet’s minimums and rookie minimums. I recall it being somewhere in the $10-12 million range.
*as to whether an actual offer was ever made to Mitch, I have no idea. But there were reports (I believe from Begley that there were negotiations and that it was a priority to bring him back” prior to the Shamet and Alvarado signings.
There may be a consensess as to your hatred for the guy (which is jusutifiable in numerous ways) but to call him a nepo moron just isn’t accurate.
He wrested control of MSG and cablevision from his father and took MSGS public in 2010 at $29. It closed this week at $395, a 13 fold increase in 16 years.
Since we keep score in business with money, I’m fairly sure his board doesn’t think him to be a moron.
I think you might have made that up.
That’s bc the league keeps negotiating bigger tv deals and franchise values are soaring.
Franchising sports team enables a cartel. You can be a moron and see your franchise value explode.
Z-man from yesterday:
Yes. Jamarion Sharp as a two-way, under our control, would be fine. The Knicks need to develop a 3rd string center. And he absolutely needs strength training and to develop an offensive game that goes beyond lobs, putbacks and dunks. But his defense is NBA ready.
Mika Ortiz interviews Andre Drummond
He talks the talk. Now can he walk the walk?
Grew to like Clarkson very much, but this would be a good bit of business. He’s durable, dependable, and presumably highly motivated.
Our bench defense gonna suck with him & Drummond, though.
fwiw, I generally dislike the Celtics, but they’re far from my mortal enemy. Apart from coming from some provincial urban suburb of the greatest city on earth where you can’t legally wear nothing but a jockstrap(has to have a tail or a thong or it’s indecent) in a gay bar because puritan as fuck, the Celtics aren’t like some evil rival of ours. What Garnett did to Melo was bullshit but who gives a shit. We ended them then and two years ago. Mitch wants to fuck around with some ugly leprechaun looking bitches that’s his business. No biggie.
Would be funny if people chose their team based on the moral compass of its owner.
If that were the case, Gayle Benson and the Pels would have a big following. She is by all accounts someone who has done a great deal for that community.
And yet, that team seems horribly mismanaged. I guess it’s true: you don’t win friends with salad.
very interesting mister clarence, very interesting indeed…
no secret I’ve forever fantasized on rocking a beautiful head of hair (I’d choose better hair over a bigger dick 7 out of 7 days)…
never really thought about rocking a tail though…definitely do enjoy dress up…so so happy costumes are in at the protest, I’m motivated to show just off that…
will need to give the tail thing some more thought…bushy or slender, hmmmmm…
“I think you might have made that up.”
Well, back on June 19, a respected poster related this:
Now did those negotiations get to a point where an offer was made? Or was Windy mistaken? I have no idea.
Clarence, I assume that you are a bunch younger than me. My hatred of the Celts goes back to the 1960’s. Probably not something that I can explain in a way that makes sense to you, but it is what it is. I tend to loathe dynastic teams in general, but there’s more to it than that with the Celts.
https://x.com/Dav1dChabot/status/2073854759132434562
Interesting thread on various cheap(ish) backup center prospects we could try to trade for.
Would you mind sharing the targets? You need a twitter account to view comments
mitch turned his truck green…now I am mad…
still hoping against probable hope it’s murray on tv calling games with clyde/monica next season…
desertion is like a capital offense in most civilized places…sure not nearly similar situations…
I don’t know, some how some where some way sort of adjacent…
Hubert, here’s the final tweet of the thread:
Definitely got some decades on me Z-man and I can respect that. I recognize the old hatreds and I’m on your side if it comes down to it, but the new Celtics ain’t got shit on Miami and Chicago for me.
Blazers would be in this group, when Paul Allen was their owner.
Edit: Alan beat me to it. Except Cisse was mentioned earlier as #1 choice.
DeRozan would be an instant bucket for us and another person who can bring the ball up.
My hope is brown can turn Diawara into a defensive presence off the bench. Alvarado and Shamet are good defenders too. If OG or Bridges is playing with the second unit it should offset Drummond and/or derozan.
But if we got his route with derozan, we definitely need our last center to be a plus defender.
Karlo Matkovic is an interesting trade candidate, I had kind of forgotten about him. He’s really more of a PF than a center and is not a plus rebounder, but he’s an athletic 6’10” and is a stretch big who also racks up some stocks as a help defender. He doesn’t really fit the mold of what we need on defense at this stage in his career, but he’s talented and athletic enough to where he makes you wonder if he could be coached up on that end. I’d imagine that the Pels like him, as he played a good number of minutes as Zion’s backup last year. He’d be an out of the box kind of solution but I’m intrigued.
Sorber isn’t close to ready. We need someone who can play this year, not a project.
I like Oso. I’m not sure what too expensive is. This is the most critical bench piece. We need to pay a real price for it.
Ware’s my dream target. Would like to see if a godfather offer like Diawara, Kolek, unprotected ‘33, and a swap could get it done.
I’d be fine with Matkovic. He seems to have quite a few qualities you might want in a third big. The big negative is that he’s not a great rebounder for a C, but the floor stretching and rim protection seem to make up for that a bit.
This England-Mexico game is going to be a banger
Soon to be 37yo Demar Derozan on a minimum is likely to be a far better offensive player than Clarkson. Yet just like Clarkson, he should have to prove that he can give an acceptable effort on defense as a condition for getting rotation minutes. (I was shocked to see Clarkson’s transformation, even more than I was with KAT…maybe Mike Brown is on to something?)
I’d like to think that playing for a team that went 22-60 probably didn’t bring out his best. But in theory he would be a significant upgrade from Clarkson if he is willing to accept a much lesser role than he is used to for the chance at a deep playoff run. The dude hasn’t gotten out of the first round since 2018, and hasn’t been in the playoffs since getting bounced in 5 games in 2022 with the Bulls. Brown coached him a bit in Sacto so maybe there’s some chemistry there, or the opposite, as he got fired for losing the locker room.
-Sorber is only 6’9″ doesn’t have a lick of NBA experience, is coming off of an ACL, and just had arthroscopic surgery on the same knee. Pass.
-Ighodaro doesn’t really excite me but would be fine with him.
-I don’t see Philly giving up on Bona yet, not until they see what they have in Huk. Even so, he seems kinda low b-ball IQ to me, was completely unplayable against us in the playoffs. He does fit the bill physically, though!
-I like Vukcevic a lot. Not a great rebounder and not really a stretch 5, but can protect the rim a bit. Seems like his salary is above the minimum so he’d be our TPMLE play. I’d be fine with it, but pretty meh, would rather have kept Huk.
-Duop Reath and Charles Bassey are the absolute bottom of the barrel. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Freeman sucks and Mogbo is raw and undersized. These guys seem like Jemison-level, so might as well just go with him if it comes down to that.
I hope Leon can reel Looney in, and if not, then one of Cisse, Vukcevic, or Matkovic. I can’t imagine any of the UDFA’s being able to help this year.
Guys, I am never wrong
Real limb you went out on there 😉
That was one hell of a half of soccer.
I have watched every World Cup since 1990 and this is shaping up to be the best (with maybe the exception of 1998
Why call a sports team that represents a whole city a nationality . I’m Italian -American and there ain’t no B’ball team named after my ancestors ; I don’t like anything about Boston ,never met a person that I even remotely liked from Boston ,was there once for work and hope I never have to go back to Boston . Boston sucks .I love the scene in spike Lee’s new movie Highest to lowest when yankee fans get on the subway and start chanting “BOSTON SUCKS” with a venomous close up . I love me some Mitch but please do not paint your truck green ,,Do your job and hope your team mates love you and you have fun ,you silly Billy .
As a long time USMNT supporter I hope Mexico fucking loses…
DeRozan > Clarkson in virtually every way. There’s really no comparison. But DeRozan is not a backup and getting pushed into that role could/would demoralize him. I would be shocked if the Knicks added him.
Mexico are definitely the Celtics
This World Cup is awesome
You can’t get more efficient on a pitch than England tonight.
It really is awesome. That is one of the best games I have ever seen. I have seen a lot
Credit to Mexico. They were ferocious.
But just an amazing effort by England. Fucking magnificent. Jude in particular played one of the best games you can play.
I will say though, analytically, I think Mexico won.
I only want free agent 3rd centers who have legit playoff experience under their belts, so in order:
1. Looney
2. Kleber
3. K. Love
4. maybe Plumlee or Olynyk
I just don’t see the point of bringing in a developmental guy who isn’t our draft pick because none of the ones on the scrap heap look at all like diamonds in the rough.
I also want to be able to cut this guy whenever I want to in case a better option pops up midseason.
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