Posted by oohah:
if the above is true, tehn should isiah be fired? one, for having "screwed up many times," and two, for absolutely failing at a quick fix? whether you're a fan or james dolan, you should want this guy gone, yes?
I'm all for firing Isiah -- if you know that we are getting somebody who "should" put us on the right track. "Fire Isiah" is not a strategy. Firing Isiah to assuage Knicks fan's need for somebody to be fired in order to put a face on the blame does not help anything. Firing Isiah and replacing him with Joe Schlameel just starts a new cycle of what we have had going for nearly 10 years.
Fire Isiah? Fine. Who do we bring in? It's a two-part solution, but nobody has a reasonable guess at the second part except for fantasy's about GM's who are already employed elsewhere.
while i personally think that no one could have done as spectacularly bad as isiah, i see where you're coming from. but just because the only names people get excited about are the big front office names doesn't mean that's the universe of candidates. in just the last few years guys from within good organizations but who i've never really heard of have gotten GM jobs and look like they may do OK - presti in seattle and ed stefanski in philly. clearly the jury is out on those guys, but i'd be just as willing to give the protege of a colangelo or walsh or jerry west a shot as i would the real deal.
OK this isn't really a question... i hate monday morning quarterbacking as much as iyamwatiam or anyone here. but when i look at this team, i think it could be so much better off not by making different trades but just by not making certain moves. i'm not proposing crazy packages for KG, duncan, kobe (although i thought we had an outside shot at him at the beginning of this year). i'm pretty sure that this team would be much better now if the mo taylor, jerome james, curry and/or randolph, and of course, steve francis moves had never happened. we'd have a more balanced, reasonably salaried roster - probably have a better record and more trade options.
It could be. I think at least one of those moves got us some picks. I think the James move is overblown. MO Taylor is a distant memory, I don't view him as a huge setback. I never wanted Curry or Randolph. I don't mind Randolph because he understands basketball and he isn't lazy.
But it is hard to say. The team who has alledgedly benefitted the most from our stupidity, Chicago, seems to have flamed out already with some other stupid signing, trades, and other unwise decisiosn.
So it could have been better. And I think when this season is over, we'll see it could be worse, and in general, we'll be where we should rightfully expect to be considering all the albatross contracts and players that were here even before Isiah.
none of those moves got us picks - i intentionally didn't include the rose brothers' trades since they got us picks in return and are thus, in my mind, up for debate to an extent. incidentally, mo taylor cost us at least 1 second rounder. basically, the point of that list is that there were no redeeming factors to any of those trades. we gave up young players and/or picks to trade for, keep and play these characters, and this team would be winning more games now without the guys we brought in.
i didn't even mention the marbury, TT and crawford trades because that early in isiah's tenure, i think they're arguable whether they should have been made for what we gave up. but as unpopular as they are now, i could still find 5 other moves that were unambiguously bad uses of resources.
the bulls... i'm not going to monday morning quarterback them either. they made mistakes in terms of players and should be doing a lot better record-wise. i don't see their subsequent decisions (using cap space on wallace, drafting ty thomas & noah) as reflecting on isiah at all.
about the layden contracts... not a single layden player would be on the roster today without isiah giving an extension. if the point was to rid the team of those egregious mistakes (
), we easily could have done that without mortgaging our next 3-4 years at the same time. isiah and dolan are probably both to blame here, but the fans have every right to be frustrated.
see, i'm not sure about this. how could this team get under the cap with the contracts we have? looking at our salaries, we're three years away from under the cap if we go that route. the roster inherited from layden couldn't have been any farther than that, right?
i'm not even an advocate of getting under the cap, just of only paying reasonable (thus, tradeable) salaries to players. who on this roster is tradeable aside from the guys on rookie contracts?
I am not a cap guru, but I am pretty sure it is possible to get under the cap quickly. Marbury is expiring next year and I believe Rose is too. They are both salary-dump city. The only other enormous contract is Randolph and I bet he could be traded to some team for expirings or short contracts if cutting salary was the goal.
On top of that, Crawford, Curry, the youths, can all be traded for assets like draft picks. They don't have tremendous value, so maybe we won't get equal value considering what we gave up, but there are no Spoon or Anderson contracts who were basically extremely tough to move.
oohah
ditto on the cap guru thing... we may just have to agree to disagree here. i look at our salaries... aside from fred jones (expiring) and malik and steph (next year), the bulk of our dead weight expires in 3 years. that's no better than layden's roster. and the advantages as far as trade value goes for these guys in youth and talent they give up in character, work ethic and reputation from before their time here and their contribution to this **** sandwich.
isiah could have put us in a better situation capwise, but the francis and then randolph trades pretty much killed that chance in my mind. his MLE signings haven't really helped either.
[Edited by - Masterplan on 01-16-2008 09:42 AM]
