FireHornacek wrote:You know in sports that if a team suffers a great disaster and loses many players due to death, that team is allowed to draft a new team from the other teams in the league. NBA has a rule that a team can protect only five players on its roster for this "Disaster Draft." Everybody after five is fair game to be picked by the depleted team.So which five Knicks right now do you protect if another team gets wiped out? (Yeah, it's a morbid topic, but at least it is creative question.)
I protect these five:
Porzingis
Otter From Animal House
Courtney Lee
Sollozzo the Turk
Frank The Frog
Those are the five that this team can not part with.
The interesting "twist" in a disaster draft is that the "lending" prohibition to trades is non existent.
Thus a team who is depleted can draft a veteran player and them IMMEDIATELY re-trade the player without any of the other limitations on a normal trade under the CBA, even back to his original team.
Usually, a draft last X number of rounds, if your team doesn't get a player picked, it's "skipped", and all teams can protect another specific set of players ( i.e. Protect 5, face the draft, possibly lose one or none, then protect 3, then possibly lose one or none, then protect A number of players, rinse, repeat)
So let's say Franchise A wants to really protect 9 players. The drafting team would draft a specific player agreed upon, then would trade the player back for a pick or something asset wise, then Franchise A could protect another 3 players immediately, thus actually protecting 9 players for the cost of said asset.
The flip side would be a "side by side" trade, where the drafting team would take on a bad contract in the draft, in exchange, that team would do a separate trade to compensate the team for eating the bad contract. It just wouldn't be listed as so.
It's one of the few situations where normal trade conventions in the normal CBA are sort of jettisoned. A truly gutted team in the NBA like this, it's detrimental to the entire league.
The league would also have to step in in terms of cash hit. The contracts are guaranteed, so the dead players will get the payout to their families, even if the cap charges are cleared. Paying a whole new set of players essentially doubles the operating budget, which could cripple many teams in the league. (Not everyone is the Lakers or Knicks out there) Insurance covers some of it, but you can't have team in the league go financially bust over something like this.
It would create an opportunity to dump Noah's contract. Maybe.
Odds are the Knicks would be skipped in a dispersal like this. A team like the 76ers or Boston would be hurt pretty badly.