Martin’s shut down the thread but I think it has value so I’m restarting it without the poorly articulated point by point analysis or the race baiting.

So, putting that aside...speaking as a veteran poster just recently returned, I don't get the sense that this board has a bias toward Isiah at all, and saying its 50/50 is probably being generous to the Isiah supporters. Just scan down the recent primary postings; a post comparing Isiah's signature acquisition to a mediocre role player with the first name Zaza; A post pointing out Matt Barnes' success at Golden State followed by a chorus of Isiah Thomas cursing, with only one poster saying, "hmmm, might the inconsistent minutes Barnes received from Brown (i.e. starter to dnp in nothin' flat) have something to do with his never being able to find traction on this roster?" Of course, name a player that did under Brown and you get a gold star; and then there is the very thread which we are now restarting.

So I’m putting the question a different way...

Why does Isiah still have supporters despite his poor record on the Knicks?

Some perspective (and this is just to start things off)…Many make the fair point that when Isiah arrived the prudent thing to do was blow the team up, attempt to get under the salary cap to sign free agents, and otherwise rebuild via the draft. Isiah didn’t do that and he is vilified for it. Yet it would seem they don’t wonder…if that was a plan Dolan would accept (to suck for four years while rebuilding) then why was a big nationally recognized and respected name brought in to do it? Further, those same people can never put forward a plan for actually implementing that plan, i.e. what team was going to give us ending contracts and draft picks for the famously over-paid Allan Houston, the infamously over-paid Shandon Anderson, the broken-down Charlie Ward, East-West Howard Eisley or the underachieving Keith Van Horn? To get draft picks you have to give value back with your veterans. We didn’t have much of that. Look at what the players have done on other teams since we let them go...not a whole lot. We were building our future on Milos Vujanic, Maciej Lampe and Frank Williams for Christ's sake.

So Isiah’s plan was prudent if poorly implemented. We had a high priced and unmovable veteran in Allan Houston who was still putting up 20 points per game and still had some gas left in the tank (don’t forget, he carried the team to 38 wins largely by himself the year before). So the idea was to surround him with enough talent in order to clear out the underbrush and build a young core for the future under the protective umbrella provided by the powerful back court of Houston and Marbury. But, unfortunately, Houston’s injury led to retirement and Isiah wasted time and money trying to salvage the plan with patchwork moves because, lets not forget, this is what he was hired to do. In sum, he added two more years of salary cap inflexibility to try and bring some excitement back to the Garden and he failed, but that young core has begun to come together.

Which brings us to the Curry deal…Isiah gets taken to task for failing to protect the first round pick and he should be. But the critics should note (again, perspective) that Isiah had little reason to think a team that had won 33 games the year before and was adding a HOF coach should own anything better than a pick in the 10-12 range the next year in a draft that Isiah thought (correctly it would appear) would be fairly weak in game changing talent. And while this debate will continue to go on until the Knicks start winning some games, the doubters must admit that Curry went a long way (no, not all the way) toward justifying the investment this year, and has become the anchor of a young core that is presently flawed but still building. This wasn’t going to happen in a day, folks.

Isiah was given the chance to redeem himself has Coach and largely, he has done so. He did an excellent job this year of building the team back up, fostering relationships with the players, establishing roles, and getting the most out of his guys. Lee, Curry and Crawford emerged as forces in the league, Mardy and Renaldo contributed far more than most expected and benefited from being brought along slowly away from the spotlight, and Richardson and Marbury played the best ball of their careers when healthy. Isiah has shown himself to be a very good (no, not great) coach and I can’t imagine there are more than a handful of guys out there that could have done a better job with this group. He may not be the best guy for building up the program long term (I like Rick Carlisle and wish he could be brought in as assistant coach), but for now I find little in his coaching to criticize him for.

Look, to sum, anyone who took over this team after Layden shat all over it was going to fail in the short term. Period. Unfortunately for us, Dolan thought bringing in guys like Thomas and Brown would fix things, but in the end the bigger names were just bigger targets, likely adding to the distractions and bringing attention to the team when really, the best thing for it was to drop off New Yorkers radars for a few years. But that wasn’t ever going to happen, lets be realistic. And yes, this team is getting better. So count me as a supporter, because as long as the effort and improvement are there, that’s what I think fans should be.

Whatever the record.

This is pretty reasonable asessment and the "dropping the Knicks from New Yorkers radars" is hapenning by itself now
You can full people but you cannot full life. The reality will come and put you in the place you deserve.
The intensions was OK but the goal was not what New Yorkers want.
We want team which will compete hard, will show a characted and have only one goal to win every game and to win it all in the end.
Dolan want the show to go on and Isiah was bilding what Dolan want.
And the result will NEVER be accepted in NY. Period.

I disagree with your assessment of how strong this team is and where it’s going.. Here’s what we got:

Curry. Terrible player in chicago – I didn’t want him even before I heard what we gave up.

Craw – poor judgment, no d, showed a brief flash under lb of playing a more controlled rip Hamilton game but has since reverted to his chucking.

Frye – has all the signs of a bust

Marbury – a failed experiment.

Francis. I can’t imagine a single person having a good word about this one

Nate – guy is extremely unreliable.

Big game – my favorite player, so acknowledging the truth is painful on this one.

Jeffries – waste of space.

Q – major damaged goods

The only players he brought in that I like are lee, balkman and collins. We’re into the others for years and years and millions and millions.

The brown tenure was a fiasco of the highest degree. Anyone saw from his history, from Denver to new jersey to Philadelphia to Detroit (with many other spots along the way) that you gotta be extremely hands-on with this guy, he’s higher than high maintenance. If you want him it’s either because you’re going to be a peace-prize level diplomat like pat croce brokering peace every day between brown and his alienated players, or you’re handing him a championship-ready team and canning him after he’s delivered on it, like joe d. isiah got played and he got the franchise played.

And we’re without our 2 consecutive lottery picks for eddy curry, who led us to 23 and 33 wins.

There you have it.

Right now, no one really knows what we have because we don't know if: (1) Curry is going to actually improve his passing and defense; (2) whether Balkman, Collins, and Lee can actually improve their shooting; (3) whether Frye can pull his game together and start contributing on a regular basis, especially defensively; (4) whether Nate can mature and develop a more consistent game; (5) whether Q can come back from back surgery and play at a high level; and (6) whether Crawford can cut down his turnovers and improve his shot selection.

If all or most of these questions are answered in a favorable manner, I think IT has assembled a damn good team. If most of these questions are answered unfavorably, then this team needs to be blown up because we would have few useful parts. Dolan gave IT the extension and people still support IT because, although we don't know the answer to these questions, we have seen enough to have a reasonable hope that most will be answered favorably over the next 2 years.

I think Isiah changed course to youth when he made the Curry trade. Until then he was still trying to win today and was using Marbs as his building block.

Posted by Marv:

I disagree with your assessment of how strong this team is and where it’s going.. Here’s what we got:

Curry. Terrible player in chicago – I didn’t want him even before I heard what we gave up.

Craw – poor judgment, no d, showed a brief flash under lb of playing a more controlled rip Hamilton game but has since reverted to his chucking.

Frye – has all the signs of a bust

Marbury – a failed experiment.

Francis. I can’t imagine a single person having a good word about this one

Nate – guy is extremely unreliable.

Big game – my favorite player, so acknowledging the truth is painful on this one.

Jeffries – waste of space.

Q – major damaged goods

The only players he brought in that I like are lee, balkman and collins. We’re into the others for years and years and millions and millions.

The brown tenure was a fiasco of the highest degree. Anyone saw from his history, from Denver to new jersey to Philadelphia to Detroit (with many other spots along the way) that you gotta be extremely hands-on with this guy, he’s higher than high maintenance. If you want him it’s either because you’re going to be a peace-prize level diplomat like pat croce brokering peace every day between brown and his alienated players, or you’re handing him a championship-ready team and canning him after he’s delivered on it, like joe d. isiah got played and he got the franchise played.

And we’re without our 2 consecutive lottery picks for eddy curry, who led us to 23 and 33 wins.

There you have it.

Great post. I highly agree. That summarizes the botch that is the NY Knicks.

All I can say is I love Kill4luv's new sig. Classic.

Bottom line--IT has new contract--it makes no sense to debate a done deal. Let the W's dictate the future.

Why is Isiah not held accountable for the amount of coaches he's brought in that obviously weren't fits. So many that he was forced to coach the team.

Posted by nixluva:

Posted by BRIGGS:

Bottom line--IT has new contract--it makes no sense to debate a done deal. Let the W's dictate the future.

Isiah is going to be here for a while, this is true. Dolan is a loyal guy and he never really wanted to fire IT to begin with. Only if he had no other choice would he have gone that far. Also Isiah has only begun to really work with this current group and he's had some success in getting something out of this team. Even at the end of the year with all the losses, this team continued to play hard for him and remain united. They were sxciting and frustrating to watch, cuz we could see how close they were to being able to win so many of their games.

To be sure there are a lot of unanswered questions, but we got some positive signs from guys that we will be leaning on this year to step up. Besides are we all expecting this team to immediatley reach the highest levels or are we looking at this team like any other developing team, which will go thru the usual steps of development. Cuz I get the idea that there's a lack of patience with this team, where there's a much more patient take when it comes to other teams. WHY? I think it's because we follow our own team more closely and tend to ignore the fact that many of these other teams haven't done much better or have done worse.

My lack of patience comes from you telling me this team would win 41-46 games this year because of the deep bench. I trusted you. When they won 33 I became impatient.

Posted by Bippity10:

My lack of patience comes from you telling me this team would win 41-46 games this year because of the deep bench. I trusted you. When they won 33 I became impatient.

Bip you REALLY need to get over yourself! My opinion should have NOTHING to do with how you personally feel about the team. Regardless of whether this team had won half of it's games or not, they would still be a team of the future. This team still requires patience and recognition of the stage that we're at. This isn't a right now team like Miami that is loaded with Vets who are about done in this league. And just for the record at 29-34 this team stood a shot at still reaching 41 wins with a strong finish. 12 wins to end the year would've done it and that wasn't impossible if the team was healthy. Even if they only went 10-9 that would have had them close to on target. So just relax on all that crap.

With regard to the bench, in what way does ANY TEAM have a bench that can make up for the loss of 3-4 of their best players being out all at once? When you lose that many key guys all at once there's a natural period of adjustment that a team has to go thru and in our case it took too long and wasn't enough. GO AHEAD and tell me that a team which was basically at best about a .500 team, is supposed to be able to handle that much loss of production and experience? You want to keep bringing this crap up like you have some kind go great point and YOU DON'T. This is sheer ignorance you keep spouting. I explained that a good bench is there for getting thru foul trouble, suspensions, back to backs and injuries, but not in the way that we saw to end this year. No team wants to go the last 20 games with a depleted roster.

It's true that we didn't get good performances from Frye and Jared and that might have given us a chance to win a few more games. If Balkman and Collins were a bit more experienced that could have helped. Nate seemed to make a ton of crucial mistakes, but he seemed to be learning as the year came to a close. We'll see next year how much these young players gained from this year and how hard they work this summer.