nyknickzingis wrote:You look at Sixers, Suns, Lakers, Kings, Magic. These teams are in the lottery every of the last few years, tanking as much as they can in most cases. The Knicks on the other hand were royally screwed with the pre-Phil Jackson era of poor trades with sending out draft picks. We lost two draft picks in the process of these last 4 drafts. Yet, here we are stacking up pretty ok against these complete tank projects.So where we stand ......
Sorry, I think a lot of guys here are not seeing the bigger picture across the entire league landscape.
The NBA administration tried to push cooked lowered projections on the future cap in the preseason, mostly in reaction to Durant going to Golden State. Even with trying to create essentially "Here is so much money, you can't want to leave your original drafting team" strategy, players are figuring out you can still make 100 plus million in your career or more and still make it up on the back end in endorsements and other opportunities later if you win and contend.
What no one totally expected as that only 79 out of 105 playoff games possible were actually played. Even with the refs basically trying to drive series into extended situations to draw them out, the weakened East got hammered by the Cavs and Golden State just decimated the West. The league is becoming top heavy, which means shorter playoff series, more blowouts in these formats and fewer playoff games total. Which drives down the total revenue, which drives down the future cap.
Given that the cap actually did make a major jump without a smoothing option ( the owners here were right in the past, that kind of major jump would be great for players and the NBAPA short term, but long term it would hurt everyone, Michele Roberts is of course a big fat idiot, but no one can say that in public), a lot of very ugly contracts were signed, which is going to choke out the future cap situations for many teams in the next few seasons. Cap space is going to very valuable very soon, not to the degree in the past where Theo Ratliff's expiring deal was like gold from heaven, but more and more teams are going into the tax zone to try to retain their core players, and more and more teams are going to try to wiggle out of the tax in the near future.
What does this mean for the Knicks in the near future?
The East has been gutted. George and Butler are gone. Who knows who will be next. It means more Eastern teams will be weaker, making it harder for the Knicks to "organically tank" This will impact their future draft positions. The other issue is in an "organic tank", one of the reasons you are losing is you are trading off all of your more veteran talent for younger/cheaper assets for the future. The Knicks however can't do this. Noah is a dead contract, might be the worst in the league. Lee is a declining player and those last two years aren't looking so appetizing. In a relative sense, with the money getting thrown around, his deal though is more palatable to market conditions. Lance Thomas is a horrible contract. (Go to a Dollar Store sometime. Just because it's a dollar doesn't mean it's a "value" This defines Thomas and his contract. Just because it's cheaper in a relative sense doesn't mean it's a good way to spend money in a controlled setting like this) Hardaway just got a deal that has become virtually impossible to trade in the future. While market forces shifted the kind of offer the Knicks made, it's a market that's about to collapse. While Melo is likely to be moved, he's going to create a situation where at least one bad contract is going to have to come back to make the salaries match.
The Knicks have just enough veteran players to make organically tanking impossible in a gutted Eastern Conference, and these are players that will be tough to move in a choked out cap environment going forward. This could mean the difference between picking 12th in a draft versus picking 6th. You can see in this last draft, how much of a difference than can make. On the flip side, Western teams, the bottom rung ones, are going to get hammered down and its going to be easy to lose games. The Knicks and other Eastern teams are going to be competing to tank against those guys in the near future.
The Knicks have finally figured out it's time to organically tank, but the ideal time to do so was the past three years or so, when they were devoid of picks and when the league was discussing actual lottery reform in reaction to Philly's Process. That cap space they burned on Noah and Lee and Hardaway and what was Rose could have been used to churn the space for assets , much in the way Brooklyn did with DeMarre Carroll.
Warren Buffett once said - Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.
When the rest of the league was blowing money like nuts for guys like Biyambimbo during the cap spike, that was the time for the Knicks to show fiscal restraint. As long as they hit the cap floor, they didn't have to spend carelessly. Instead they doubled down in the face of the market that is going to collapse very soon.
Look at the Nets. Gutted in the Billy King era. They got a young GM who was groomed from a winning organization. They give the kid a free hand to run the team and the owner backs off. The GM and coach are on the same page. The GM has room to grow and have a future there long term if it works out. They are choking out other teams caps with RFA offer sheets they know other teams will match, to increase the value of their own cap space, which they are "renting" out to get future assets, cost controlled and draft quality. They already had a hard situation, they didn't make the future road any harder than it had to be.
The current Knicks, make the simple insanely hard. Everything is harder than it really has to be.
The Knicks are leap years behind most other teams in the league in a rebuild. Want to know how? Consider this. If you could trade the entire Knicks roster, front office and situation with every other team in the league, would you do it? Would you trade Zinger, FrankN, Hernangomez and these gaggle of bad contracts for Simmons, Embiid, Covington and Fultz and a stockpile of draft assets? Would you even hesitate? Going down the list of teams, it's hard to find many situations where the Knicks are preferable in a total trade franchise scenario.
This team isn't hopeless. But it's ugly. It's a self inflicted kind of ugly. And the few young guys they have with upside are likely going to leave as soon as they can.
The Knicks seemingly have no clue how the actual current and modern NBA marketplace operates. It's to the point where it's just bizarre. No other pro sport creates such limited utility in a rebuild and the Knicks can't even seem to get that part right. It's like being nailed in place in front of toilet with a bowl the size of Texas, and still pissing all over the floor around it anyway. It's like idiot kids who screw up their lives, go work for the family business, which is successful, and still screw it up ( younger Buss) How do you blow that?
Yes, if you look at the Knicks at some very specific angles, things look good.
Yes, if you are at 1:47 at a bar before it closes, some beer goggles will make that muffin top buck toothed chick with bad acne look like Ariana Grande.
The Knicks need to look good without the beer goggles. This should not be this hard. This is what makes all of this so ridiculous. You could literally get Tina Fey to write a sitcom about a pro sports team and just mirror the Knicks right now for the plotline. When your real life behavior, in a dire pursuit of success starts to look like a plot of an Amy Schumer movie, something is very wrong.
It's 2am guys, the bar is closing. The Knicks are a muffin top.
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