nyknickzingis wrote:Took the Rose/Noah/Lee with Melo experiment to go all in and it failed. But we are not stuck with that position for good. Rose is a free agent. Melo and Lee can easily be traded if we want. Or we can keep them to be vets that can help the team win more games.
Noah's contract is the worst contract in the entire NBA. And there are some real stinkers for contracts out there, which is saying quite a bit about how badly the Noah deal will hurt the Knicks this year and the next three years after. After waiting to get Stoudamire and Bargs OFF the payroll, the Knicks go ahead and lock in another bad big man contract for a long time.
Rose COST the Knicks Robin Lopez and Jerian Grant. Lopez played actual team basketball, he wasn't elite in any one area, but wasn't horrible in any one area either. He was on a good value contract, his age wasn't prohibitive for the length of the deal and he wanted to play here. He also cost the Knicks nothing but cap space. He fit the four criteria of a good FA signing A) Helps you now B) Offers a viable trade asset both now and later C) Signed to a value contract against the life of the deal D) Team would not be paying him deep into his decline phase of his career.
While Jerian Grant might not pan out, and that's looking more and more true each day, it's still, as a matter of principle, a bad idea to keep trading your cost controlled young players instead of giving them some chance to develop. (While Grant's window is closing, at least some kind of upside exists, where it does not with a broken down Noah and Rose. )
Part of the deal also was dumping Jose Calderon's contract.
Which goes back to the horrible deal that sent Chandler/Felton for Larkin, Ellington, Dalembert, Calderon and two picks, one of which, IIRC, ended up being Early.
For a team with so few assets when he walked in the door, botching the Noah, Rose, Chandler situations, plus not trading Melo immediately, before the NTC and when he would have had the most trade value in terms of return, are all back breaking moves. The Jazz drafting Rudy Gobert with a 2nd round pick is a sign of good work. The Warriors finding guys like Monta Ellis and Gilbert Arenas in the 2nd round is good work. The Hawks getting Kent Bazemore for a 2 year/4 million deal when he was stuck behind a deep Warriors team is good work. Robert Covington for peanuts when anyone could have signed him by the 76ers is good work.
Taking Zinger with the 4th overall pick, given upside and positional value and projected draft value, is just not screwing it all up while you are there.
Jackson has made a few good decisions, but with so little margin for error, he's made some pretty long term bad ones as well.
Could a young front office type from the Warriors or Spurs or Rockets done better? I honestly think so. Wow, not gutting all your teams future draft picks. I don't know if you should win an award or accolades for what is basically common sense about team building. There are probably a couple of homeless guys near Grand Central Station that could figure that out.
The bar was very very low. Wasn't hard for Jackson to do better than that benchmark.
Just because you are better than Zeke ( is that really that hard?) doesn't mean there is not a long long road from just OK to excellent. Jackson is not horrible, but the Knicks desperately needed excellent.
Jackson has severely hurt this team over the long haul. I'm not saying Zinger and Hernangomez won't pan out, I am saying let's not pretend there are other guys in the league who could have done just as good or better for far less cost and far less ego involved.
Jackson is not horrible. But that's faint praise. He's mediocre.
2/4/2017 3:13 PM