In early February, shortly after news that the Knicks would make Leon Rose their next team president leaked out, the Cavaliers front office was together for a meeting ahead of that week’s trade deadline. It was a business-as-usual affair except for one moment — the chance to needle Brock Aller about his future.

He had been a Cleveland executive for the last five years, but as soon as Rose’s hire appeared imminent, his colleagues couldn’t avoid ribbing him. They all knew that Aller already had a good relationship with Rose. The message was succinct, even if it was facetious: There goes Brock to the Knicks.

Aller played it cool, but about two months later those jokes became real. The Knicks hired Aller last month to be their new VP of basketball and strategic planning, the first addition made by Rose since he took over in March. That choice was the first indication of how Rose plans to reorient the front office — he has also since added Frank Zanin and Walt Perrin — as he takes over a franchise that has piled up seven straight losing seasons.

“He’s a big-picture guy,” David Griffin, the former Cavaliers GM and now Pelicans lead executive, said of Aller, “who is also a diabolical genius from a cap standpoint.”

In Aller, Rose has hired an adviser renown for his mastery of the salary cap and exploitation of collective bargaining agreement penumbras. Although Aller is not well-known, he earned plaudits for his work helping the Cavaliers manipulate the cap and became a vital resource to Griffin and current general manager Koby Altman.

He should have a significant voice in the Knicks front office as well. Aller and Rose have known each other for a long time, before he officially moved over to the Cavaliers, and have a relationship forged through a mutual acquaintance — World Wide Wes — who was close with Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert. Rose, with loads of cap space and seven first-round picks over the next four years left for him by his predecessors in front office, will have room to be resourceful with the Knicks.

Aller earned a reputation for creative thinking during his time in Cleveland, where his job encompassed strategy, planning trades and free agency, and looking for inventive transactions. He joined the Cavaliers front office in 2014, after Griffin was named GM, and immediately started pushing for the team to acquire Brendan Haywood. Aller recognized that Haywood’s contract had been grandfathered in from the old CBA, and would give the Cavaliers a useful trade resource because it ballooned from roughly $2 million in 2014 to a non-guaranteed $10.5 million for the 2015-16 season. The Cavaliers acquired Haywood that July and dealt him away the next offseason to create a large cap exception and ease their financial burden.

“He’s not a scout, he never played, he’s not like a basketball guy in the basketball sense,” said one league source with knowledge of Aller’s role in the Cavaliers organization. “Just every day he would come up with ideas — trade ideas, G League stuff, everything in the CBA. He would always try to find loop holes. He would look into every possible thing with that kind of stuff.”

The league source added: “He’s like a computer in a way because he studies that ****, he reads it, he knows everyone’s contract, everyone’s incentives. He’s really good. He’s really bright and smart.”

Before hiring Aller, Griffin said he was first going to look outside the organization to fill that job. But Aller had made an impression on him, and Griffin became convinced by Aller’s work for Gilbert, where he was also involved in strategic planning and development for Quicken Loans. Aller had served as a liaison between the Cavaliers and Gilbert and the rest of his business holdings. Gilbert had tried to convince the Cavaliers front office to bring in Aller, Griffin said, and he was finally the GM that did.

Griffin installed Aller as part of what he called “the nerd cave,” a three-person group charged with coming up with ideas to push the boundaries of the cap. Aller gained a reputation as detail-oriented executive regularly looking to wring out as much value as he could from a transaction. He also remained an important intermediary between the organization and Gilbert, league sources said.

“He gets more excited about protections on a second-round pick than anyone else on the planet,” said an NBA executive who knows Aller. “He loves that stuff.”

People reached for this story said Aller’s knowledge of contracts around the league is almost encyclopedic. He was one of the driving voices behind the Cavaliers’ two-year, $6 million non-guaranteed contract with Pat McCaw in 2019, league sources said. It was a controversial deal in which Cleveland signed the restricted free agent in late December and then released him after just three games and ahead of the league’s deadline to guarantee contracts for the season.

“Brock can rank the order the value of every piece of paper in the NBA,” Griffin said. “Not in terms of how good a player they are, but in terms of how useful their contract is. He will make sure that if he has anything to say about it, every deal your organization signs has a level of optionality that some teams don’t think of. That’s the benefit of him. You’re not going to do better than him in terms of contract structure.”

Aller played an integral role in the Cavaliers’ acquisition of Timofey Mozgov in January 2015, as the team made a number of trades to improve its roster after landing LeBron James the summer before. The Mozgov deal was the culmination of a series of trades (five in all) and signings in which the franchise was able to acquire three key rotation players for a team that went to the NBA Finals that season and won the title the next. The sequence involved Cleveland taking minimum deals to slowly add more cap space and acquire non-guaranteed contracts, all while using second-round picks to grease the wheels.

The Cavaliers, Griffin said, became the only team in NBA history to go from having max salary cap room to becoming a tax-paying team in the same season. That was able to happen because of Aller’s contributions and the work of that trio. The NBA has since cleaned up the CBA loopholes that allowed those trades to occur.

The NBA executive added: “(The Knicks are) going from not doing that at all to maybe the most creative guy in the league.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/NYKnicks/comments/gop85l/a_diabolical_genius_the_new_bright_mind_in_the/

Interesting article. Rose is building a real brain trust in the FO. Hope this mix of old and new faces is given some time to work.