Not ready to retire, Walsh continues push to land next big fish By Ken Berger
http://www.cbssports.com/nba/story/13622955/not-ready-to-retire-walsh-continues-push-to-land-next-big-fish/rss
Life eased back to normal Friday in the city where I live. Sports attention spans quickly boomeranged back to baseball, and it'll be wall-to-wall Yankees and Mets from now until the first time LeBron James and Dwyane Wade visit Madison Square Garden in the fall.
The NBA enjoyed a month-long stranglehold on the league's biggest market, only it wasn't about the sport itself, but the vapor of this empty pursuit of LeBron that, if nothing else, came to a merciful end Thursday night. The chatter, the interest, the debate -- it was something to, um, witness over the past few weeks; the city buzzing about basketball the way Madison Square Garden used to buzz for playoff games.
This kind of interest, this kind of energy is what Donnie Walsh, a native gentleman of the city, envisioned when he came to town two years ago to rescue the Knicks from their shameful decline. And on this day, the day after James chose to be Wade's sidekick instead of another city's savior, there are people who are calling Walsh a failure.
Those people have it all wrong.
There was a published report Friday morning that Walsh was stepping down as president of the Knicks, partly due to health reasons and partly due to his failure to land the big fish, Prince James. Walsh denied he was retiring in a conference call with reporters Friday, saying 'I basically I'm all right.'
Walsh, 69, has one year left on his contract and is finding it harder to deny he's in failing health. Within weeks of accepting the challenge of fixing the Knicks, who needed him more than they ever needed James, Walsh was diagnosed with mouth cancer and had a piece of his tongue removed. A life-long smoker, Walsh quit the habit the moment he walked into the hospital for the operation. For 50 years, a walk from point A to point B was as good a time as any for a cigarette, but enough was enough. No more.
Like clockwork, the next health challenge showed up on Walsh's doorstep around the same time of year; the worst possible time. After the draft, Walsh had spinal surgery to remove bone spurs from his neck -- a procedure that included cervical fusion, Newsday reported. So Walsh, who'd been escorted into the toughest professional challenge of his career by cancer, was relegated to a wheelchair for the very free-agent pursuit he'd so capably positioned the Knicks to undertake.
"There is no correlation between my tongue where I had the cancer removed and the operation I had on my neck just recently. ... I'm doing what I was hired to do."
Due to the surgery and his precautionary wheelchair, Walsh didn't travel to Los Angeles for the Knicks' first free-agent pitches to Joe Johnson and Mike Miller. But he made it to Cleveland to meet with the Prince, physically immobile but mentally sharper than ever.
"We want to build our team into a contending team as quickly as we can," Walsh said Thursday, a sense of resignation washing over him just hours before James would announce his decision. "That's exactly why we took the tack that we did."
Walsh didn't get LeBron; he swung hard and missed on the player who could've validated his plan in the simple-minded way that sports-talk radio culture needs to have things validated. Based on James' decision to dine with Wade and Chris Bosh at an ornate table set with the best championship china, James was never coming to New York -- Walsh or no Walsh. He didn't have the courage for the challenge, the way Walsh -- cancer and spinal surgery and all -- had the courage for it.
And now people are calling Walsh a failure, which is the biggest fallacy in the fallout from Prince James' scorched-Earth gambit to Miami.
Some will say that if Walsh had drafted Brook Lopez instead of Danilo Gallinari (rubbish), or Brandon Jennings instead of Jordan Hill (a fair point), maybe there would've been the biggest Garden party of all Friday -- the introduction of James as a Knick and the return of basketball to its rightful place of relevance in Walsh's New York. But if Derrick Rose wasn't good enough for James, then Jennings wouldn't have been, either. And you can carry this argument as far back into the past as you want: What if Isiah Thomas hadn't traded a fistful of first-round picks for Stephon Marbury and Eddy Curry? What if Walsh hadn't inherited a team that was over the cap and under the necessary talent threshold to make the playoffs -- not to mention under the asset threshold needed to rebuild?
"We were in stasis," Walsh said, explaining in laymen's terms to his laymen audience what that meant. "We couldn't do anything."
So Walsh did what he had to do. He took a wrecking ball to the roster and the payroll, and created what wound up being $36 million in cap space once the official number was set Wednesday at a better-than-expected $58.044 million. Think about that: A team that had routinely spent $100 million a year on payroll to win 23 games, had enough cap space for the two best players in the NBA -- if only they'd wanted to come -- with room left over.
Did Walsh close the deal? When it comes to the two best pieces he could have gotten -- a dominant big man and an unstoppable offensive force -- he went 1 for 2. He got Amar'e Stoudemire, who won't be enough to make the playoffs by himself but will prove to be a handy asset in a turnaround that Walsh will someday be able to take pride in having made possible. Five top free agents have changed teams, and the Knicks got one of them. That's a lower batting average than he was shooting for.
"I told you we needed to get under the cap and get some free agents to help our team, and the next day it was, 'LeBron, LeBron, LeBron,'" Walsh said. "And I never said anything about him. I was always looking at it as a process that this franchise had to get back to a position where they had their cap managed so that they could take advantage of situations. And I think we've got that -- not just for this year, but for the next two years."
Walsh made a very interesting point at the end of the media event Thursday for Stoudemire, his lone free-agent catch among the top-tier All-Stars available. When asked about the Knicks not having quite enough cap space to pursue a maximum-salary free agent next summer, Walsh shook his head defiantly and said, "No. We will be able to do that."
Tony Parker and Carmelo Anthony would be the primary targets, though Anthony is widely expected to sign a three-year, $65 million extension with Denver this summer. Anthony hasn't put pen to paper yet -- and Walsh shouldn't give up hope until he does. Parker, witnessing the last gasps of the Spurs' dynasty, wants to play in New York and could be available in a trade before he hits the unrestricted market next July.
So Walsh, for however long he's around, will have options to do exactly what he set out to do -- just not with the faces most people wanted to see. In the sign-and-trade for David Lee completed with Golden State Thursday night, Walsh got two potential starters (Kelenna Azubuike and Anthony Randolph) and a solid frontcourt backup (Ronny Turiaf). All three will play vital roles in Mike D'Antoni's system.
Could Walsh have done without trading the rights to swap 2011 first-round picks with Houston? Could he have kept the Knicks' 2012 first-round pick, which went to the Rockets in the Tracy McGrady trade, which cleared the final cap space for this summer's free-agent chase? Sure he could have. And those players drafted over the next two years would've needed three years each to develop -- meaning Walsh would've been back home again in Indiana before seeing any palpable results of his actions. If that was going to be the case, why come in the first place?
This was a plan that had to be executed, and was executed to perfection right up to the moment when Prince James chose his royal subjects in Miami over the Knicks, Bulls and his hometown Cavs. It will haunt Walsh, and Knicks fans, that James was able to leave Cleveland -- long believed by those inside the Garden to be the biggest obstacle to Walsh's plan -- and yet he still chose someplace other than New York.
The Knicks didn't get LeBron, because it turns out they were never going to get him. But you can't convict Walsh of misreading his prey, because we all did -- even the people James worked over for seven unfulfilling years in Cleveland. Walsh got D'Antoni a player maker Friday -- closing in on free-agent point guard Raymond Felton -- and the Knicks will make the playoffs next season. And when Donnie Walsh leaves New York, he will leave as a success, not a failure. That should come as no surprise or revelation to anyone.
7/11/2010 6:03 PM
