THJR is actually playing well and is market value. I would have never signed him to
That deal, but let’s not forget who did. Steve ****ing Mills. So I’m not giving Kudos to them for two late picks in the first round. They need to get value for Dennis smith otherwise this trade isn’t bearable.

Dallas is being cautious right now. Leonard is missing games for the Clippers, certainly not the same thing, but teams are cautious with their assets. NO doing the same with Zion.

Kyrie is the new Marbury, so the nets are screwed going forward, but don’t give our front office one ounce of credit. $70MM in cap space and one signing that may produce a late first.
That’s piss poor.

MS wrote:Hardaway and Lee are expiring this offseason, let’s not make it out that these were albatross contracts holding up our progress for years to come.

THJR is actually playing well and is market value. I would have never signed him to
That deal, but let’s not forget who did. Steve ****ing Mills. So I’m not giving Kudos to them for two late picks in the first round. They need to get value for Dennis smith otherwise this trade isn’t bearable.

Dallas is being cautious right now. Leonard is missing games for the Clippers, certainly not the same thing, but teams are cautious with their assets. NO doing the same with Zion.

Kyrie is the new Marbury, so the nets are screwed going forward, but don’t give our front office one ounce of credit. $70MM in cap space and one signing that may produce a late first.
That’s piss poor.

I generally agree.

The cap space means nothing when people don’t want to sign with you.

And people don’t want to sign with you when your leadership up top sucks. Mills and Perry have shown no ability to sign/trade guys who contribute positively on offense and defense. Everyone they acquire doesn’t fit together and has massive deficiencies - such as low basketball IQ, isolation basketball, poor defense and poor shooting. Mills/Perry have consistently chased the wrong type of players and have shown an inability to acquire much talent. They’ve had a couple of hits - and a couple of misses - in the draft. That’s not enough to keep these guys around.

We need to keep building on the young talent we have by making smart moves with the players around them. Our front office hasn’t done that. They’ve done the opposite and they’ve impeded some of the young players progress as a result.

Many fans outside this forum on other websites are upset that Mills and Perry consistently sign and trade for the same TYPE of player: can’t shoot, low basketball IQ, awful defender and isolation scorer. Their acquisitions either have some or ALL of these qualities. Not to mention that these dudes spent $70 million - and I don’t care if it’s 1 year or 1 day - on contracts and spent it on the same type of players I mentioned above. Additionally, they didn’t actually correct ANY of the Knicks weaknesses in the offseason.

The point of the matter is that Mills and Perry have shown no indication whatsoever that they can ever put together an actual good team that has any good qualities and can complement each other.

MS wrote:Exactly....

You want to build a culture and you bring in three isolation players.

The smart move was identify the best point guard on the market that you could overpay in the short term, Ricky Rubio. Allow him to run an offense and put the young guys in the best position to succeed.

Guys aren’t going to improve watching Julius Randle dribble up the court and shoot threes. If you bring in guys make sure there are multiple dimensions to their games and they are veterans that can help growth.

We all know the Knicks, led by incompetent baby Dolan, don't make the smart moves.

Steve Mills is a career loser with zero history of doing anything positive in the NBA.

Scott Perry is a man who has been around the league in some capacity for 2 decades and never even sniffed a GM job until his friend Mills offered him one. His stint as assistant GM with the Magic is one of the worst performances in modern NBA memory. He helped make the franchise completely irrelevant with his moves.

Free agent signings under Mills/Perry:

Tim Hardaway Jr
Ron Baker 2 years $9 million for no reason
Mario Hezonja
Emanuel Mudiay (trade but I'll include it here)
Bobby Portis
Julius Randle
Wayne Ellington
Elfrid Payton
Noah Vonleh
Reggie Bullock
Taj Gibson

and last but certainly not least: Ramon Sessions

It's all a part of the plan. Give them each a 5 year extension and they'll start getting serious in year 5.

fwk00 wrote:

JamesKPolk wrote:

fwk00 wrote:

JamesKPolk wrote:KP can never play a minute again and that trade will still be awful. Don't tell yourself otherwise.

The Knicks were damned lucky to get what they did. DSJ and KP were both risky, damaged goods who had high upsides if the risk was eventually unrealized.

The tedious, chronic whining about this is just unbearable.

I salute the front-office for the KP trade because they did, in one fell swoop, what many of us had hoped but silently doubted should happen - a.) not resign a gimpy, anemic KP to a massive long-term contract AND create some cap space AND land a few FRPs. Mission accomplished!

Furthermore, the FO deserves Big Ball kudos in passing on Kyrie and Durant who are looking more and more like a toxic, contagious bad trip for the Nets [and all the MSM toadies who just scorched the Knicks as being pathetic losers of the summer sweepstakes].

Now, the summer signings have yet to play out but it wasn't a wholesale bust despite our record - probably polluted by bad advice from Fizzle Twit. This coming trade deadline should make course corrections. And those two extra FRPs are yet to be determined.

So, tell yourself otherwise but this is the truth, Ruth.

I sometimes read this forum and I think certain people are living in an alternate dimension, where the Knicks are making consistently good moves and haven't been an embarrassment for 20 years. Posts like this - which are so far out of reality - are an example of that.

We didn't maximize Porzingis' value. Whether Porzingis plays another game or not is a moot point. He had value at the time of the trade and we didn't capitalize on it.

The guy who signed Hardaway to that contract made the trade. That contract sucked the moment it was signed. I don’t understand what your argument even is. There was no reason to use Porzingis to dump the contract - especially when we ended signing garbage. That’s worse than Walsh using a first round pick to dump Jeffries.

KP was called the 'unicorn' and lauded for his exemplary skill for a 7'3 big. An ACL injury dented his value, yes, but not to the level of getting some low level 1sts and a scrub back in return. The only reason we got a return like this is because we insisted on attaching garbage contracts to him in a trade so we could get under the cap and ultimately sign a worse player in Randle. If we had not attached bad contracts to Porzingis you get back MUCH more in value than we got from Dallas. Porzingis is still a 24 year old 3 point shooting, athletic 7'3 big man with shot blocking skills. I'm sure there's some resentment for the way Porzingis left but Porzingis was the Knicks best trade commodity and held high trade value in the league, no matter what you want to believe from the Knicks PR machine.

Blaming Fizdale on the roster moves is even more deluded than thinking the Porzingis trade was the best value trade we could make.

There was one thing we needed to do: Sign some shooters and show you can build a team that compliments each other.

You can tank and suck and still look like an NBA team that runs an offense and tries on defense. Instead our prized front office since a bunch of isolation players, non shooters, and poor defenders.

You have $70 million. Is there any explanation why you couldn’t find a PG who could shoot? What about someone that can shoot besides a journeyman backup like Ellington?

Has Scott Perry shown he can make even a barely passable trade or free agent signing since he’s been here? By that I mean, has he shown he actually knows how to put together a competent basketball team. I’m not talking wins and losses. You feel me? He hasn’t. Because he can’t. He fuxking sucks just like he did in Orlando. And that’s what we’re becoming.

Put it to you this way. The Knicks had $70 million to work with this offseason. These were their needs heading into this season: find a decent rotation point guard who can keep the defense honest with an outside shot, sign some wing shooters and a stretch 4/5, being in some capable perimeter defenders

Besides Ellington, and I’m being kind here since Ellington is a nothing signing and doesn’t matter at all since he shouldn’t be playing more than 10 mpg, they didn’t address any of the above needs. And the only need Ellington addressed is shooting.

Everyone else addressed nothing. Morris is redundant here. I would have rather thrown money at Oubre and not had Portis, Morris and Bullock. Maybe the Suns match, who knows. But Oubre is getting better and he can shoot. That’s just one example. That doesn’t matter anyway: the point of all of this is that no needs were addressed at all. To say you can’t address any needs with $70 million means you’re a miserable failure at your job. I don’t care if it’s a 1 day deal or a 5 year deal.

To make matters worse - awful isolation players that they brought in only hinder the development of guys like RJ. There’s no need to see Randle and Morris jack up 35-40 shots between them.

Once you come to the realization that Steve Mills, a franchise cancer for 20 years, and Scott Perry, who has absolutely nothing of note in his career, are not the right people to lead this franchise then we can have a logical discussion.

I never made the assertion that the Knicks "have made consistently good moves". I have been a Knicks, Giants, Yankees fan since a teenager in the mid-sixties. I've seen some ups and downs in that time. The Knicks have been the most frustrating of the bunch even at their best.

The NBA constrains teams like no other league and the constraints are targeted at large market teams. Rather than replay history can we agree that Free Agency is heavily weighted to players NOT leaving their existing teams unless they're unwanted and that the draft, now that kids as young as eighteen (how long will it be before 16 year olds will legally challenge to be eligible?) has become an even bigger crap-shoot than ever?) is no guarantee of competitive recovery?

Given *that* reality, The Knicks FO *has* drafted well enough and, given the Free Agency politics, have done a sufficiently credible job. Yes, they have. But, NO, it hasn't resulted in a transformation YET... Trust me, as John Wick might say about people shooting dogs, "I GET IT!"

And the reason it hasn't led to a transformation yet is that the only real avenue left for a team like the Knicks is to transform through trades. Which brings us to the one you keep polishing as the gold standard of FO incompetence.

In *your* alternate reality, Porky was a unicorn, a rising star, the franchise building block. AND when Pinata Phil tried to trade him you heard names being bandied about that make us all drool wishing Phil could have pulled the trigger and landed multiple talents and two or three FRPs. I trust Phil could have pulled that off. But in those heady days it was fashionable to trash Phil as a sleepy, incompetent, out-of-touch FO type - I'm guessing he was on your list.

But you never stopped drooling, likely speculating that even injured, Porky could net all that. You forget that he and his brother were playing nasty games with management, that Porky was accused of porking a woman who claimed she didn't sign up for that, AND Porky and his brother trashed the team he wasn't yet playing with as unworthy AND...AND...AND... EVERYBODY in the NBA knew this dirt (maybe more). High value? Cuban, like Riley, will do anything to win - the rest of the league isn't so reckless. So when the fantasy trade didn't happen, you went into a funk you still haven't recovered from.

I have no idea what you are talking about regarding Hardaway - I never mentioned him but now that you brought it up I thought we'd have to pay to get rid of him. Yes the signing of Hardaway was hard to take - almost yet another middle finger thrown in Phil's direction.

The FO gets trashed for not signing better vets AND for playing vets who take time from youth too young to be NBA rotation players. You want it both ways. Payton and Frankie ARE getting their minutes. They are still kids and *will be* stars. I regularly ache because they can't yet satisfy their obnoxious critics. So when youth such as they are play there's no acknowledgement that they are "developing", its that we don't have a veteran to play instead. Position by position there's nothing but "I just want the opposite" syndrome.

Perry and Mills are just the latest whipping boys. The next set will be no different. When luck intervenes, the ones employed will be geniuses.

Let's get this one thing straight - Mills and Perry are awful talent evaluators and team builders. That has nothing to do with luck. The evidence is staring you right in front of your eyes but you refuse to see it.

Drafted well enough? Kevin Knox is a nothing player. The guy has zero intangibles and is one of the least efficient players in the league for 2 straight years.

RJ Barrett was the consensus #1 pick for most of the collegiate season until Zion and Ja surpassed him. He was still the consensus #3 at the time of the draft. I give Mills and Perry very low credit for drafting someone who you would be crazy not to draft there.

Mitchell Robinson is the best pick they've made to date.

Overall, their draft record is spotty at best.

Additionally, Elfrid Payton is entering his 6th NBA season. He's not a "kid with potential". He's a veteran PG with no jump shot and below average defense that was signed because he was drafted by Perry, who is obsessed with trying to make NBA players out of his bust draft picks like Payton and Hezonja. He's not a star in the making. Even making this assertion is incredibly ludicrous and insane. Not borderline insane - just insane.

The same can be said for Frank, who I actually like. He's not a future star. he's a future rotation role player on a good team. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is no fantasy trade that you speak of. The only fantasy is the one you're living in where a scrub point guard with low basketball IQ, no defense and no jumper and 2 middling future low 1st round picks are enough value for a player who was considered our franchise player. The ONLY reason that was the return was because of the front office's decision to attach the contracts of Hardaway and Lee to any Porzingis trade. And for what? To sign "future star" Elfrid Payton and Bobby Portis?

Get real, bud. The front office never had any plan besides chasing the dream of Durant and Kyrie, When that failed, they showed once again that they are incompetent and incapable of building any semblance of a basketball team. And you're still here eating up all the excuses and hoping against reality that things will be different this time.

nykshaknbake wrote:

JamesKPolk wrote:

fwk00 wrote:

JamesKPolk wrote:

fwk00 wrote:

JamesKPolk wrote:KP can never play a minute again and that trade will still be awful. Don't tell yourself otherwise.

The Knicks were damned lucky to get what they did. DSJ and KP were both risky, damaged goods who had high upsides if the risk was eventually unrealized.

The tedious, chronic whining about this is just unbearable.

I salute the front-office for the KP trade because they did, in one fell swoop, what many of us had hoped but silently doubted should happen - a.) not resign a gimpy, anemic KP to a massive long-term contract AND create some cap space AND land a few FRPs. Mission accomplished!

Furthermore, the FO deserves Big Ball kudos in passing on Kyrie and Durant who are looking more and more like a toxic, contagious bad trip for the Nets [and all the MSM toadies who just scorched the Knicks as being pathetic losers of the summer sweepstakes].

Now, the summer signings have yet to play out but it wasn't a wholesale bust despite our record - probably polluted by bad advice from Fizzle Twit. This coming trade deadline should make course corrections. And those two extra FRPs are yet to be determined.

So, tell yourself otherwise but this is the truth, Ruth.

I sometimes read this forum and I think certain people are living in an alternate dimension, where the Knicks are making consistently good moves and haven't been an embarrassment for 20 years. Posts like this - which are so far out of reality - are an example of that.

We didn't maximize Porzingis' value. Whether Porzingis plays another game or not is a moot point. He had value at the time of the trade and we didn't capitalize on it.

The guy who signed Hardaway to that contract made the trade. That contract sucked the moment it was signed. I don’t understand what your argument even is. There was no reason to use Porzingis to dump the contract - especially when we ended signing garbage. That’s worse than Walsh using a first round pick to dump Jeffries.

KP was called the 'unicorn' and lauded for his exemplary skill for a 7'3 big. An ACL injury dented his value, yes, but not to the level of getting some low level 1sts and a scrub back in return. The only reason we got a return like this is because we insisted on attaching garbage contracts to him in a trade so we could get under the cap and ultimately sign a worse player in Randle. If we had not attached bad contracts to Porzingis you get back MUCH more in value than we got from Dallas. Porzingis is still a 24 year old 3 point shooting, athletic 7'3 big man with shot blocking skills. I'm sure there's some resentment for the way Porzingis left but Porzingis was the Knicks best trade commodity and held high trade value in the league, no matter what you want to believe from the Knicks PR machine.

Blaming Fizdale on the roster moves is even more deluded than thinking the Porzingis trade was the best value trade we could make.

There was one thing we needed to do: Sign some shooters and show you can build a team that compliments each other.

You can tank and suck and still look like an NBA team that runs an offense and tries on defense. Instead our prized front office since a bunch of isolation players, non shooters, and poor defenders.

You have $70 million. Is there any explanation why you couldn’t find a PG who could shoot? What about someone that can shoot besides a journeyman backup like Ellington?

Has Scott Perry shown he can make even a barely passable trade or free agent signing since he’s been here? By that I mean, has he shown he actually knows how to put together a competent basketball team. I’m not talking wins and losses. You feel me? He hasn’t. Because he can’t. He fuxking sucks just like he did in Orlando. And that’s what we’re becoming.

Put it to you this way. The Knicks had $70 million to work with this offseason. These were their needs heading into this season: find a decent rotation point guard who can keep the defense honest with an outside shot, sign some wing shooters and a stretch 4/5, being in some capable perimeter defenders

Besides Ellington, and I’m being kind here since Ellington is a nothing signing and doesn’t matter at all since he shouldn’t be playing more than 10 mpg, they didn’t address any of the above needs. And the only need Ellington addressed is shooting.

Everyone else addressed nothing. Morris is redundant here. I would have rather thrown money at Oubre and not had Portis, Morris and Bullock. Maybe the Suns match, who knows. But Oubre is getting better and he can shoot. That’s just one example. That doesn’t matter anyway: the point of all of this is that no needs were addressed at all. To say you can’t address any needs with $70 million means you’re a miserable failure at your job. I don’t care if it’s a 1 day deal or a 5 year deal.

To make matters worse - awful isolation players that they brought in only hinder the development of guys like RJ. There’s no need to see Randle and Morris jack up 35-40 shots between them.

Once you come to the realization that Steve Mills, a franchise cancer for 20 years, and Scott Perry, who has absolutely nothing of note in his career, are not the right people to lead this franchise then we can have a logical discussion.

I never made the assertion that the Knicks "have made consistently good moves". I have been a Knicks, Giants, Yankees fan since a teenager in the mid-sixties. I've seen some ups and downs in that time. The Knicks have been the most frustrating of the bunch even at their best.

The NBA constrains teams like no other league and the constraints are targeted at large market teams. Rather than replay history can we agree that Free Agency is heavily weighted to players NOT leaving their existing teams unless they're unwanted and that the draft, now that kids as young as eighteen (how long will it be before 16 year olds will legally challenge to be eligible?) has become an even bigger crap-shoot than ever?) is no guarantee of competitive recovery?

Given *that* reality, The Knicks FO *has* drafted well enough and, given the Free Agency politics, have done a sufficiently credible job. Yes, they have. But, NO, it hasn't resulted in a transformation YET... Trust me, as John Wick might say about people shooting dogs, "I GET IT!"

And the reason it hasn't led to a transformation yet is that the only real avenue left for a team like the Knicks is to transform through trades. Which brings us to the one you keep polishing as the gold standard of FO incompetence.

In *your* alternate reality, Porky was a unicorn, a rising star, the franchise building block. AND when Pinata Phil tried to trade him you heard names being bandied about that make us all drool wishing Phil could have pulled the trigger and landed multiple talents and two or three FRPs. I trust Phil could have pulled that off. But in those heady days it was fashionable to trash Phil as a sleepy, incompetent, out-of-touch FO type - I'm guessing he was on your list.

But you never stopped drooling, likely speculating that even injured, Porky could net all that. You forget that he and his brother were playing nasty games with management, that Porky was accused of porking a woman who claimed she didn't sign up for that, AND Porky and his brother trashed the team he wasn't yet playing with as unworthy AND...AND...AND... EVERYBODY in the NBA knew this dirt (maybe more). High value? Cuban, like Riley, will do anything to win - the rest of the league isn't so reckless. So when the fantasy trade didn't happen, you went into a funk you still haven't recovered from.

I have no idea what you are talking about regarding Hardaway - I never mentioned him but now that you brought it up I thought we'd have to pay to get rid of him. Yes the signing of Hardaway was hard to take - almost yet another middle finger thrown in Phil's direction.

The FO gets trashed for not signing better vets AND for playing vets who take time from youth too young to be NBA rotation players. You want it both ways. Payton and Frankie ARE getting their minutes. They are still kids and *will be* stars. I regularly ache because they can't yet satisfy their obnoxious critics. So when youth such as they are play there's no acknowledgement that they are "developing", its that we don't have a veteran to play instead. Position by position there's nothing but "I just want the opposite" syndrome.

Perry and Mills are just the latest whipping boys. The next set will be no different. When luck intervenes, the ones employed will be geniuses.

Let's get this one thing straight - Mills and Perry are awful talent evaluators and team builders. That has nothing to do with luck. The evidence is staring you right in front of your eyes but you refuse to see it.

Drafted well enough? Kevin Knox is a nothing player. The guy has zero intangibles and is one of the least efficient players in the league for 2 straight years.

RJ Barrett was the consensus #1 pick for most of the collegiate season until Zion and Ja surpassed him. He was still the consensus #3 at the time of the draft. I give Mills and Perry very low credit for drafting someone who you would be crazy not to draft there.

Mitchell Robinson is the best pick they've made to date.

Overall, their draft record is spotty at best.

Additionally, Elfrid Payton is entering his 6th NBA season. He's not a "kid with potential". He's a veteran PG with no jump shot and below average defense that was signed because he was drafted by Perry, who is obsessed with trying to make NBA players out of his bust draft picks like Payton and Hezonja. He's not a star in the making. Even making this assertion is incredibly ludicrous and insane. Not borderline insane - just insane.

The same can be said for Frank, who I actually like. He's not a future star. he's a future rotation role player on a good team. Nothing more, nothing less.

There is no fantasy trade that you speak of. The only fantasy is the one you're living in where a scrub point guard with low basketball IQ, no defense and no jumper and 2 middling future low 1st round picks are enough value for a player who was considered our franchise player. The ONLY reason that was the return was because of the front office's decision to attach the contracts of Hardaway and Lee to any Porzingis trade. And for what? To sign "future star" Elfrid Payton and Bobby Portis?

Get real, bud. The front office never had any plan besides chasing the dream of Durant and Kyrie, When that failed, they showed once again that they are incompetent and incapable of building any semblance of a basketball team. And you're still here eating up all the excuses and hoping against reality that things will be different this time.

Mills I think no one will argue he's any good.

Perry hasn't really had enough data points to really conclude on his drafting ability. Robinson was a great pick. Barrett was fine, but like u said anyone could have drafted him. Knox hasn't really been that good, but besides SGA who else available at #9 has? I don't take his assistant GM career into much account because he wasn't the guy making the decision.

Would you now rather have KP signed to the max on a down year with major injury concerns? Marcus Morris has been a good signing, Randle TBD. The others haven't been great but they were probably the best available that would take 1 year deals. Who would you have signed? Maybe my expectations are low, but in years past picture all the guys we signed but make them all 5 year deals and instead of having 1st rounders from other teams plus our own, picture us giving away every other one.

Why were those guys the best available? I don't believe that.

I already gave some insights on who I would have signed but again this goes right back to the TYPE of player Mills/Perry are going after. They all fit similar patterns of players that they have actively recruited or signed/traded/drafted. And these type of players are not the ones you sign to win basketball games. Not unless you think low basketball IQ, poor defense, poor shooting, lack of fundamentals and poor playmakers are keys to success in the NBA. Even guys who I like, like Mitchell Robinson, have a lot of those traits.

I think it's exactly what you said - your expectations are low because this group hasn't traded any draft picks. That's about all they good they've done. Just because they haven't traded all their first round picks like their predecessors once did, however, does not mean they're doing an exceptional job. That's literally the bare minimum any executive should be accomplishing. And remember that this practice already started from the Phil Jackson era so it already predates the 2 clowns running the front office. It's easy to settle for below average when all you have been used to is terrible moves from many other executives (and the owner) but if you look at the bigger picture and look at how these 2 individuals are trying to construct a basketball team you would see that they are just as awful at their job in many similar ways to their predecessors, except their moves don't involve large contracts (well, there was Tim Hardaway Jr) and trading all their picks.

JamesKPolk wrote:And let me make note that I reference to other executives prior to Mills as "predecessors" when, in fact, he has been one of the Knicks key decision makers for the better part of 2 decades. So he's one of the predecessors I'm referring to.

Not even close. He was an MSG exec. He was also gone for a while. Layden, Isiah, Donnie, Grunwald all were under Dolan. This is not endorsing Mills, its endorsing what was.
If Mills is the one doing things different than how things were in the past, why not just recognize what it is. When in our past did we develop a 2nd round pick like we are with Mitch? Demonstrate patience with Frank. Before, we’d package him with a pick to gain mediocrity.
Results? Not apparent. Does this mean we keep Mills? Perry? Not sure I can point to a series of egregious errors. The record speaks for itself, but he is in his third season at the helm. Give it to Ujiri? Gonna cost you a first round pick. Presti? Sure, bring him in. Personally I don’t mind an injection of hope. But I’m not gonna get excited just because Mills is gone. Panic Jimmy is still pushing the buttons. In fact if he fires Mills its nearly as good as an knowing its the wrong move?

JamesKPolk wrote:

Nalod wrote:I thought Isiah was in his ear for years?

Yeah, and who told Dolan to hire Isiah?

Guess who's been around longer than Isiah?

Both answers are teflon Steve Mills.

And don't get it twisted - Scott Perry was hired as the whipping boy for Mills. If things go sideways with Dolan he's going to throw Perry under the bus the first chance he gets. Just like he did with Fizdale, which I predicted was going to happen way before it happened.

Mills has mastered the art of keeping his job under any circumstance and he won't stop now.

And don’t forget Mills’ only season as Knicks GM he over-paid for a player we previously traded in restricted free agent Tim Hardaway Jr. The main contract we dumped in the KP trade.. sickening