Wow Walsh only gets a year? And to say he didn't change the culture is ridiculous - MSG was a 3ring circus until he came and he's successfully weeded out 90% of the trash. What else do you want.

Posted by BasketballJones:

Posted by Moonangie:

Lack of leadership among the players. That sort of shyte NEVER happened when the Knicks had Oak and Ewing patrolling the locker room. Absence of leadership (and no, Allan Houston was not a leader) leads to apathy and mediocrity.

Yet another reason we MUST pursue a player like Lebron.

Right. The absence of a locker-room patrolman is the problem. Alan Houston monitoring the locker room with a video cam just won't cut it.

Monitoring the track with video cam will be much more interesting...

Posted by sebstar:

Well in baseball there is no hard cap whatsoever so a team like the Yankees can pretty much spend there way out of mistakes as evidenced by the Yankees offseason where they literally brought themselves a new front half of a pitching staff and an MVP candidate.

In the NFL contracts are not guaranteed, so a team can rid themselves of a bad deal with a stroke of a pen. Plus there is so much turnover with teams cutting players and multi-round drafts that an organization can reinvent itself overnight --- even with a hard cap.

In the NBA there is really only one round in the draft that can yield measurable impact on a franchise (although we've gotten lucky in round 2 with Isiah's drafting acumen) and the rules of the league make it almost impossible to get out of bad contracts so rosters remain rather static. I mean we've seemingly spent the whole decade trying to figure out ways to get out of bad deals" Marbury, Zach, Jefferies, Crawford, Curry.

Before it was Eisely, Anderson, Houston, Ewing. Instead of us biting the bullet and letting those contracts run out, we traded most of those deals for longer ones or exacerbated those mistakes which extended our misery. Give Walsh credit because he is not committing to any longer term deals which has been our achilles heel. People around here dont like it because they are used to splashy offseason headlines but the financial flexibility that Walsh is setting up is something we havent seen since 1996. A year where we reinvented ourselves and put together, arguably, our strongest team since the '70s

Walsh is doing the right thing no matter how much people whine about Ramon around here.

I would add Lee and Nate to this list too. They are good, home grown guys but flawed none-the-less. Perhaps over the next season they iron out the wrinkles and then sign appropriate contracts.

You know what's consistently bad? Your spelling and grammar.

btw, this is my first post from my cell ever. historic moment.

We got rid of the bad apples, and yet we were loosing games in similar fashion.

I agree a leader is so needed in the locker room, but three years of losing, results in massive heads rolling..you could be coach of the year and the following season easily get fired.

You could be patient and get fired just as easy. Utah's hall of fame coach has kept the jazz competetive for just about his whole tenure, yet a championship team seems far fetch for that franchise.

Walsh is putting us on track, but it doesn't seem like he will be able to assemble a championship in his tenure despite the cap flex he's striving for.

If we don't sign LB then were just a team with cap room and some talent, and just being competitive seems like all this franchise is striving for.

even if we don't sign lebron, the key point to succeeding under the nba's cba is that you have to have "cap flexibility."

that's been walsh's mantra.

there are free-agents every season available. we've just never been in play for them.

it doesn't necessarily even mean you have to be under the cap, but ensure that your team is attractive to free-agents, which nyc should always be, and pay most players more what they are worth than overpaying.

teams are currently not overpaying guys like they used to, especially with teams not willing to take on such massive deals for flawed players.

you say 3 years, but walsh has been here 1 year.

i'm not clear how walsh does not seem to be assembling the team you describe.

it seems that mostly the fear that we won't be able to sign free-agents is guiding this notion, yet the problem is we don't even have any evidence to suggest this won't happen just yet. doesn't mean it is for certain to happen, but perhaps we can at least see what happens over the next few years to make a fair assessment.

at the same time, the other key -- keeping valuable players: either ending deals, or guys underpaid or closer to value that other teams may covet -- is also something we have not experienced.

we've been full of a roster of guys who have been overpaid and not as valued for years.

even now, the problem of the team is players like jeffries and curry, in particular, who are the hardest to deal.

we had to give away for less than their talent value, or outright let go much of our most talented players (regardless of how "selfish" they were) to get closer to being under the cap.

this even applies to balkman who was partially dealt because of concerns about his salary vs. value to the team.

z-bo given away for ending deals.
steph banished.

on top of that we had lost key draft picks due to deals for curry and steph, which hurts the team's flexiblity in dealing with giving away talent. bad teams can give away talented malcontents even if it makes them lose more when they know they keep their draft picks.

walsh has been playing with a depleted hand since arriving, and imho, done a fairly good job of handling the situation thus far, even if there may be some debatable decisions, or non-decisions. however, all of those that were made were keeping in mind the balancing act he needs to perform to ensure we aren't an entire joke for attractiveness, talent maintenance, reality of no draft pick this year, and being near/under the cap enough to be a player in the 2010 free-agent market.

[Edited by - PresIke on 09-15-2009 1:56 PM]