Do the Knicks have the personnel necessary to become a contender? I'll define a contender as not necessarily a truly dominant team-- I'm looking for a middle-of the road playoff team. (ie 4, 5, 6 in the conference standings, vs 7, 8, and worse) In the eastern conference, a .500 record gets you in the middle of the pack, while a .400 winning percentage gets you on the fringe of a playoff spot nowadays. My opinion is a little bit of 2 and 3. I believe the Knicks have enough talent with our current injury/suspension riddled lineup to win games. I think having only 8 active players is close to ideal-- though I think the Knicks could use a healthy Q-Rich to our current mix. Many of the issues we've had this season are because we're too deep at certain position (guards are a big issue). We have a bunch of starting quality players who end up getting platoon-type playing time. And that's just no good for anyone. I think for the Knicks to be more success, we need to settle on a shorter rotation, and perhaps trade away some of our extra talent for draft picks. I think we have very good players at every position, so it's difficult to target a specific position that could use an upgrade. On paper, you can't get too much better than a Frye/Curry/Lee rotation at the big man positions-- I'm satisfied sticking to them and watching them develop; we can move Lee to SF for stretches to keep all 3 on the floor if necessary. Jeffries is solid utility guy-- he's the perfect mop up guy who can soak up minutes in the front or backcourt-- Balkman is also a great utility guy who provides the same sort of thing with a different skill set. I think the hodge-podge of guards is where we can do the most weeding. If we can package 2 or 3 players to get a power wing player (think something like a Paul Pierce/Caron Butler), that'd give us an element that we're missing. With Marbury/Nate/Francis/Crawford, there's an awful lot of duplication of skills. Alternatively, if we can get a pass-first PG for one of those guys (think Andre Miller), it might free up our offense. It's not necessarily about upgrading talent, though--- it's about finding talent that fits better in our mix.