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Westchester dates Knicks fans should circle – Posting & Toasting
Happy 30th Birthday, Cap! – Posting & Toasting
Bebe Rexha Addresses Dating Rumors with Knicks Champion Jordan Clarkson After Viral Photo – BleacherReport
The Knicks’ next moves: Plans for Miles McBride? Extensions for key starters? – The New York Times
Why this is the most important season of Miles McBride’s Knicks career – SNY
Is Jalen Brunson BETTER Than SGA?! Max Kellerman Sparks Heated Knicks Debate – Knicks Fan TV
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The New York Knicks Firing Tom Thibodeau Was the Boldest Coaching Gamble in Modern NBA History – Knick of Time
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78 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2026.09.01)”
Morning fellas! A few days ago we came up with the Mount Rushmore of greatest Knicks of all time and it got me wondering…who would be on the opposite of that spectrum. A Mount Flushmore if you will…
I started watching this team in the late 80’s so I can’t speak to any of the players that came before. I’m hoping it will at least help spark some healthy debate. I don’t have a lot of time to dig into the analytics so I’ll keep it short and sweet. These almost need no introduction.
1) Andrea Bargnani – The trade made no sense by any measure. It was only exacerbated once the dude actually played and it was clear what scrub he was.
2) Eddie Curry – hat tip to Jerome James but that Eddie Curry trade set us back so many God damn years. The fact that the picks we sent out turned into Aldridge and Noah was just icing on the cake.
3) Lance bleeping Thomas – Nobody infuriated me more than watching this dude play. For me it’s the longevity. Not a single skill/attribute above replacement level and it absolutely stupifies me that this dude was in the league for so long.
4) Chris Childs – I could have gone with Chris Smith but Childs was coming off a solid year (for the Nets no less) and immediately stunk up the joint. He came in with Allan Houston and LJ to propel the team to the next level and provided nothing of substance. He eventually was replaced by Charlie Ward in the starting lineup and will only be remembered by me for 2 moments and both were used on Kobe’s jaw.
I’m full Jerome James aheada all a them. It’s when I realized that I musta fucked up in a past life.
You’ll need a minimum number of seasons to make Mt. Flush, no?
Seems like centers are low hanging fruit here. One wing I could never stand was Shandon Anderson. He always seemed horribly useless out there.
Hard not to nominate Franky Smokes and Foxy Knoxy.
If we’re going to do a Mt. Flushmore, I think we need a few caveats. I don’t think bench players or vet minimum dudes who were asked to play outsized roles should really be put up here.
I think Emmanuel Mudiay should be in consideration. We never “got him right.”
I’d carve four faces of Bargnani.
Personal opinions aside, I think Q Rich was probably the worst producing, least impactful knick. He played starters minutes for years and seemed to never have a good game. It was kind of freaky. Plus, he took up 15% of the cap.
There are two former Knicks that made me howl in agony the moment we acquired them, and who then turned out to be every bit as horrible as I knew they would be: Andrea Bargnani and Joakim Noah.
Definitively Joakim Noah. Antonio McDyess. & Clarance Weathrspoon come to mind. Charles Smith probabaly deserves an honorable mention.
Limiting this to players is tough because it should really be all executives up there (I’d go Dolan, Layden, Isiah, Phil). I don’t blame Eddy Curry for the price we paid for him, you know?
But there’s one exception. One guy can be blamed for the price we paid for him. And I think he set the Knicks back as much as anyone short of Isiah.
Carmelo Anthony is on my Mt Flushmore.
Excellent call Donnie. So much hype coming out of DePaul and the output never matched the ego.
Noah *could* have been a good idea if signed to a *much* more reasonable contract, and if he hadn’t adopted the lifestyle that he did, at least not during the season. As a player, he was pretty useful for some time period.
Layden with the Shannon Brown / Howard Eisley trades, that doomed McDyess trade and how he completely bungled Ewings departure. Reliving this stuff really puts into perspective how far we’ve come.
This is fun reading for post-championship PTSD impacts.
One problem is we’re conflating a lot of different aspects. One is worst contracts, e.g., Melo, Curry. That in itself could be its own Mount Flushmore. One is failure to achieve anything close to their promise, which is very different and where my head tends to go (see Frank, Kevin, Mudiay, Curry again, etc.). Third is just overall suckiness (looking at you Andrea). Fourth is just not being very useful (a number of names listed, just empty outfits), which is close to not achieving promise but it’s more graded on a curve. Fifth is being a douchebag, at least while on the Knicks, so once again Melo gets a vote as does, say, Noah. Finally there’s ‘provides some of the worst moments in Knicks history,’ for which Charles Smith gets held high. Even though I love him, you’d have to consider Starks’ Game 7 as being deserving of a spot…
I’m a little conflicted with Marbury.
I would argue that we need a composite face for every undersized/corpulent big we had during the early 21st century:
Clarence Weatherspoon
Othella Harrington
Mike Sweetney
Malik Rose
Maurice Taylor
Antonio Davis
Gerald Henderson. We thought we were getting the clutch guy who helped the Celtics win in 1984. That’s not who showed up. Carmelo, because he gave us the illusion of a talented player, but he only cared about Carmelo’s world. Noah, because, he really did not know how to play basketball.
I tried to come up with a Mt. Flushmore of lottery picks but I coudn’t decide who to leave off of this list:
Frank Ntilikina
Kevin Knox
Mike Sweetney
Frederic Weis
Jordan Hill
Noah was coming off two seasons in which he had shown steep decline from his top form. His last year in Chicago he couldn’t stay on the floor and was completely hapless on the offensive end, somehow managing a .383 FG% from the center position. He was signed because Phil Jackson thought that Carmelo Anthony, Derrick Rose, Brandon Jennings, Courtney Lee and a 21 year old Kristaps Porzingis was a win-now worthy core, and that what it really needed to push it over the top was a center who could pass from the pinch post and really get the triangle cooking.
So he gave the steeply declining Joakim Noah a FOUR YEAR contract that added up to 18% of the salary cap. One of the other reasons Phil Jackson brought in Noah was because of his “character,” pretty funny because Noah then proceeded to spend his Knicks tenure partying and then lamenting that New York was “too lit.” A real professional, that guy.
That’s my most hated Knick team ever, a team that was truly a testament to one man’s grandiose hubris. Up to that point I was trying to squint my eyes at Phil and pretend he knew what he was doing, but the moment that signing was announced I knew we were just running out the clock until he got fired.
Dishonorable mention to Stevie Francis and Cuttino Mobley( ok Cuttino gets a medical exemption. Thank God for medical staff upgrade)
I would not put McDyess on there. He just had a freaky horrible injury after we got him. If he hadn’t gotten hurt, it would have been a pretty good move I think.
Cam Reddish
Yeah, I’m probably misremembering the context of the Noah signing as it was at the time.
Shandon Anderson
Bottom 5 in Knick VORP all time for players who started at least 100 games:
1. Q Richardson (-1.2)
2. A Houston (-0.9)
3. G Wilkins (-0.8)
The winners of the Players I Couldn’t Stand are:
Jerald Wilkins
Lance Thomas
Shandon Anderson
Howard Eisley
Bargnani is by far Best Player in a Comic Role. Luckily we had several of those during the horrible times.
Layden is the winner in the Best Precursor of the Vomit Emoji contest.
Bottom 15 all time VORP as knicks without any minutes or games qualifiers:
1. Knox
2. Ntilikina
3. Thomas
4. Jeffries
5. Mudiay
6. Bargnani
7. Richardson
8. Anderson
9. Smith jr (Dennis)
10. Sved
11. Houston
12. Curry
13. Wilkins
14. Payton
15. Some guy named Ronnie Price
Nice little throwback by jazzfunk with Gerald Henderson.
Some other guys from the pre-KB days who we thought were going to be one thing and then were not:
Kiki Vandeweghe
Rolando Blackman
Tony Campbell
Since it is Mount Flushmore …Frederic Weiss tops my list. Talk about flushing a pick down the toilet.
Reminds me that maybe the eighth Mt. Flushmore is Cooked Knicks. In which case once again Noah is right there, maybe also Francis and McDyess.
DSJ definitely deserves to be on at least one of the Flushmores.
When we acquired Bargnani he had a long, well established track record of being a hapless player. He had a couple of seasons early in his career where he had at least shot the 3 well, but in the three seasons before we acquired him, his 3pt shooting looked like this:
3pt%
.345
.296
.309
That’s 461 attempts and a .323 percentage. WOOF.
Bargnani was also possibly the single most low-IQ defender I have ever seen in my life, the worst help defender in the league, and rebounded like a shooting guard. There was just zero chance he was going to come to the Knicks and play productive basketball, it was a move that was an obvious disaster on its face from the moment it was announced. When he was traded, Toronto Raptor fans acted like they won the Super Bowl.
We did get some classic GIFs out of it though.
Weis is a great call.
I think the most compelling cases so far are for Weis, Noah, and Bargs.
I’m inclined to make Frank fourth. He was so bad at basketball.
Bargnani, Noah, and Curry should be locks. The fourth spot is up for grabs. And it definitely depends on how far you want to go back. Four guys from the 80’s-90’s that come to mind are Pat Cummings, Kiki Vandeweghe, Truck Robinson, and Jawann Oldham.
But it’s really hard to keep Kevin Knox off the list. That was one where the hate of the pick was pretty much unanimous, and it came at the expense of drafting a league MVP or a championship starter who we had to pay 5 unprotected picks for.
how soon we forget…yabujelly…
Raven’s got a good point, we need to sort this into categories.
The real Mt Rushmore represents birth, growth, preservation, and development. So Mt Flushmore should represent failure in the draft, trade, free agency, and then just the worst basketball player you ever saw.
Knox & Weis vie for the draft face, I think. Though Kenny Walker deserves some attention. We had the 5th pick in the draft the year after taking Patrick and he was a total zero.
Noah and Jerome James seem like the frontrunners for the free agent face.
Trade face is a battle between Bargs and Curry.
Last face is a real barn burner. That’s where the likes of Frank, Jared Jefferies, Lance Thomas, Q-Rich, Howard Eisely & Shandon Anderson (they will always be one person), Yabu, Mudiay, and Ron Baker are having a battle royal. And some of the guys from the other categories like Knox Bargs and James are participating, as well.
Oh, wait, I forgot about Zach Randolph. I hated that guy’s game, his personality, what they gave up to get him, and what they got back to get rid of him. They traded him for a guy who was literally going to die if he stepped on a basketball court, and when his condition became known they were like “eh, he’s still better than Randolph”.
Ron Baker would have just been a regular garden variety non-drafted dude who came and went if he hadn’t been given the absurd player option. It wasn’t even like the contract itself was particularly damaging, it was just like a symbol of how dumb the people running the team at the time were. I’m actually kind of glad it happened, because it’s a really funny little bit of absurdist Knicks lore. It didn’t come with a gut punch of an opportunity cost like drafting Kevin Knox.
It’s telling that, of all the variations of what Mt. Flushmore should represent, Bargnani is a nearly unanimous inclusion.
He was the reason I stopped watching the Knicks in 2015 (until Julius). He was utterly objectionable to watch in every facet.
My Mt. Flushmore seems to have all categories covered.
Worst draft pick: Kevin Knox: picked ahead of 3 ‘Nova Knicks, including a guy named Jalen Brunson, but directly ahead of Mikal, and then the reigning MVP. Never came close to being a legit NBA rotation player. Everyone here knew it was a terrible pick at the time. But hey, we’ll always have Vegas!
Worst trade: Eddy Curry*: cost 2 unprotected firsts that turned into LaMarcus Aldridge and the ‘good” version on Joakim Noah.
Worst FA signing: Joakim Noah (the “lit” version). The stench of his deal lasted 6 years after he was waived and stretched when even a moron like Steve Mills had enough.
Worst player overall: Andrea Bargnani: See JK’s post above.
*the funny thing about Curry is that in 6300 Knicks minutes he put up an impressive 110 TS+ on a 25% usage. Yet that only underscored how utterly terrible he was at virtually everything else.
Ron Baker was a stupid overpay on his extension, but as a UDFA he really doesn’t belong in this conversation. Hell, Yabu’s contract was probably worse, and if he didn’t agree to eat his player option for year 2 he might have cost us a championship.
Was Knox a worse draft pick than Frank? How about Jordan Hill?
I think you also gotta account for hope. Some of these schmucks ended hope, and some of them confirmed despair. The hope enders sucked worse.
I always loved Ron Baker, because what’s not to like about a mop-headed hustle-bunny at the end of your bench? Someone to yell for when the game’s out of reach in either direction. That he became derided for his contract was entirely the front office’s doing. Which has now created the new Worst (or Stupidest) Contract Mt. Flushmore. With Ron in the running, along with Melo’s no-trade clause. I’m sure there are others equally or more exasperating… (for some of these guys, that they were given a contract at all puts them in the running…)
I feel like Steve Francis both ended hope and THEN confirmed despair. It’s all a bit of a blur what with the passing of time, but those are two emotions that rise up when I think of his tenure.
Bottom 15 all time VORP as knicks without any minutes or games qualifiers:
1. Knox
2. Ntilikina
3. Thomas
4. Jeffries
5. Mudiay
6. Bargnani
7. Richardson
8. Anderson
9. Smith jr (Dennis)
10. Sved
11. Houston
12. Curry
13. Wilkins
14. Payton
15. Some guy named Ronnie Price
once again donnie’s kids setting him up with creedthoughts.www.gov in a word document and telling him it’s sol 5.6 coming back to haunt us.
1. eddie lee wilkins -4.1
2. lance thomas -3.1
3. larry demic -2.9
4. ken bannister -2.6
5. kevin knox -2.5
6. frank -2.5
7 malik rose -2.1
8 james bailey -1.6
9 bob thornton -1.6
10 maurice taylor -1.4
11 othello harrington -1.3
12 travis knight -1.2
13 jerome james -1.2
14 mardy collins -1.0
15 rj barrett -0.9
Bottom 5 in Knick VORP all time for players who started at least 100 games:
1. Q Richardson (-1.2)
2. A Houston (-0.9)
3. G Wilkins (-0.8)
(this is also wrong,, rj barrett, pat cummings, eddy curry)
This narrative shows the utter idiocy of the Isiah Thomas regime. My friend used to work for the Houston Rockets and she began an on again off again relationship with OAKOAK* Kelvin Cato. According to Cato, he was signed to mentor Eddie Curry and only had to play in home games ( He appeared in 18 games in the 2006-2007 season). By Cato’s own recent admission he was pretty lazy and unmotivated, so signing him to mentor Curry was like hiring Guy Fieri to be the team nutritionist.
* Given this evidence don’t know if Cato is entitled to OAKOAK status. He did donate a basketball signed by the 2006-2007 team to my Bronx class.
and some of them confirmed despair.
oh, ouch…that hurts so much…
frank had some of the most beautific and expressive eyes while out on the court…
sadly they mostly emanated confusion and trepidation…every once in a while though, he’d play okay for a game or too and get that eye of the tiger thing shining bright…
ugh, yeah – he did not belong on an nba court, or in a knick uniform…
what little hope for the future that we did have at the moment – he was pretty much as good as it got…
some very low (clipper/kings/bobcats low), not so fan-tastic basketball moments…only makes the high that higher…
we’re gonna get hi hi hi with the music on
Go New York Go New York Go
Bargnani, Knox, and Noah are all in a special category of moves that were completely indefensible when they were made, everybody knew it, nobody with any common sense really defended the moves, and then they all just marched on to their grim conclusion. The “utterly predictable failure” category.
It’s remarkable that each of those moves had a different architect behind them: Glen Grunwald, Perry/Mills, and Phil Jackson respectively, and that amazingly none of these people were Isiah Thomas.
It helps Frank’s case that Dennis Smith sucked, too. I suppose we could have taken Mitchell or Bam but it’s not like either of those guys were no brainers.
The Knox thing is truly remarkable because the league MVP was his teammate, which means someone was watching Kentucky tape the whole time and totally missing the plot!
I will not sit back and let KB’s impugn the good name of Ken the Animal Bannister. Next, someone is going to shit on Brian Quinnett and then hands will be thrown.
Yeah Steve Francis was supposed to be a final puzzle piece à la Mikal… but he very much was not.
I rank the worst draft picks as:
1. Knox
2. Hill
3. Frank
At least Frank could sort of play defense!
In other news, the Sixers extended a camp invite to 7’6” Tacko Fall (totally forgot about that guy).
Larry Brown said that Marbury and Francis were gonna be the new Clyde and Pearl!
Yeah out of curiosity I looked up H20’s VORP as a Knick and it was 12.7 so not sure where Donnie got his stats from.
We weren’t around at the time but I think the Weis & Curry moves belong in the same category.
So does the McDyess trade, which somehow gets overlooked but is arguably the worst Knicks move of the Dolan era. McDyess had just missed an entire season and Layden gave up Marcus Camby in his prime and a pick that could have been Amar’e Stoudemire for him while he was still rehabbing.
I’ll never forget hearing on the radio (because that’s how we got news in 2002) that the Knicks fired Scott Layden. The jubilation and hope lasted all of 1 second because then they said “and hired Isiah Thomas”.
back to gaming…until gta 6 hits, gonna play a bunch of Star Wars Battlefront 2…
older game release (2017 or so?)…so, the multi player environment can be pretty daunting for newer players…lots of folks whom have hundreds of hours of play already building all their toons up and practicing their “rotations” (button selection based on needed ability/weapons)…
tried it years ago, but, felt too much like call of duty, and the space flying combat is super hard…
bored enough now to start leveling all the different trooper/reinforcement classes and select hero/villian toons…
there’s this star wars galactic racer game releasing soon that looks nice, the folks whom produced the Burnout (hot pursuit was the best eva) game series worked on this, so, lots of spectacular crashes…
wolverine also releases fairly soon, looks fun, like spider man meets mortal combat…
Come on, guys, Ronnie Price made the list, it’s gotta be right.
Mt. Flushmore of guys who I thought would be good but wound up sucking:
Kiki
Truck
Q
Francis
I would add Blackman to the list and also Chris “chilly” Childs…when he was with the Nets…I thought he was good …then he got on the knicks and started drinking a six pack a day and playing like shit…
and add Spencer Haywood to the “they wuz cooked” list….
Did you know that Kiki actually shot 48.1% from three for a full season?
Sadly he was washed and injured by the time he arrived. I did get to play pick-up against him at the 14th St Y, though, so I was glad he came to the Knicks just for that one memory.
Bob McAdoo was traded to the Knicks so suddenly in 1976 (along with a future Congressman) that when he played his first game for the Knicks they didn’t have a jersey for him yet. I remember him playing in a white undershirt with no sleeves with an “11” written on the back in marker.
Dang, hubs. I completely misremembered the Mcdyess move. Wasn’t the rumor that Camby and Sprewell were both traded bc they made a snide remark about Dolan?
Yeah trading a perpetual DPOY candidate who was just entering his prime for broken down Mcdyess was bad. Also attaching a pick? Insanity!
All these slackers were big part of the knicks journey and despite the fact that they fucked up their careers and shoot knicks dreams in the head they’ll always be remembered for the hope investments and the “fun” of their bloopers.
On a parallel universe wo analytics a 11.8M Bargnani doesn’t look much worse than a 14.3M TChandler tbh …
🤔
Knicks Mount Punchmore already has 2 (knuckle) heads
Layden was the worst. He inherited a 50 win team that made the conference finals in his first season and turned it into a 30 win team within two seasons. And then he made the McDyess trade that knee capped the franchise.
Yeah. I remember McDyess was some kind of sky walker and when we got him he was some kind of kneeless blunder
It was so fucking painful to go from the tantalizing Ewing era to the dogshit of the aughts and the half-measures of the LeBron roadblock 2010’s.
It really took this most special run by this most special team to even be able to laugh about all that pain. I don’t think a merc-type chip (e.g. such as if Durant and Kyrie came here instead of the Nets) would have done it.
I was going to say “I don’t care what VORP says, Allan Houston was a good player” 🧡💙
But thankfully Milo replied with facts, which is even better.
I can’t believe no one’s brought up Jared Jeffries. I know some people tried to reclaim him during the MDA years but that dude sucked. And Ronaldo Balkman getting drafted one pick before Rondo and 4 before Lowry needs to be mentioned.
But Zeke was good at drafting!
ugh, so many games where either jared jeffries or lance thomas, someone like that, was the best we had to put on our uni and go play…
oh my goodness, it’ll never leave my head: breen saying game after game how Lance Thomas plays the right way…
yuch yuch yuch…hopefully mike breen moves on this season…
yeah, i don’t mind holding on to a grudge, at all…
despite our success, no excuse for suspect reffing in multiple finals games, and breen cosigning all of it…
cool to be a company man, just let him do it for another company…
I absolutely hated the McDyess trade. It just seemed like an attempt to sell tickets by acquiring a washed up star. There was no basketball reason for it. And the Knicks. GM was so smugly proud of the trade.
I was just thinking about that moment in game 5 when I started to realize holy shit we’re really going to do this. I don’t remember when exactly it was… I think it hit me after Brunson tied it at 83… it was such a rush. It felt like time travel, like I was with my 13 year old self, the one who listened to the games on WFAN with his dad in his room. I grabbed some rando at the bar next to me and shook him and said “holy shit we’re really gonna do this” and he totally got me and said “I know!” I enjoyed the whole ride. I was confident the whole way. But I only felt like that for a few glorious minutes. Crazy shit was happening… we were missing free throws… the extender let them beat the shit out of Brunson at the half court line… Stephon Castle snuck in for another outback because no one boxed him out to cut it to two…. but it didn’t matter at that point…. it had become inevitable. My god what a night.
And now none of this shit hurts anymore.
I’m gonna go watch the last 7 mins of game 5 again.
As bad as Thomas was, and Jackson, and Mills, Layden was completely clueless. Terrible trades one after the other. Total disaster.
I sat next to Jared Jeffries’ girlfriend on Amtrak from Union Station in DC to Penn Station in NYC. She was trying to not be specific about who her boyfriend was, but she didn’t count on me knowing the current Knicks (at the time) roster to the level that I did. And yeah, she was very hot.
back to back gm misses with layden and thomas…that’ll set a franchise back…
for me steve mills was the embodiment of all management ills…
I was always gently amused by Jared Jeffries, he would occasionally do good things (along with bad, and most often nothing at all). But a hot girlfriend? The guy had absolutely no chin at all!
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