A New Beginning
The Knicks showed us that there are adults in the room running their show now. It's about damn time.
News & Notes
There was a MASSIVE amount of news over the weekend, but I’m going to keep it short here, including only to the transactions and rumors that apply directly to the Knicks. If you want a full list of NBA transactions, CBS’ free agent tracker is excellent, and has all the deals listed from most to least important. Also, analysis of the Knicks’ additions will be in the next section.
New York signed several players: Alec Burks (one year, $6 million), Nerlens Noel (one year, $5 million), Elfrid Payton (one year, $5 million), Austin Rivers (three years, $10 million, with the later two non-guaranteed) and Theo Pinson, who was signed to a two-way contract (New York has extended a qualifying offer to Jared Harper, so that offer currently occupies their other two-way slot). The Knicks also acquired Omari Spellman, Jacob Evans and a future second-round pick from Minnesota for Ed Davis.
💰 UPDATED KNICKS ROSTER Knicks have added Austin Rivers, Jacob Evans + Omari Spellman to give them 16 NBA contracts and fill 19 of their 20 offseason spots Another move is coming, since need to be down to 15 NBA contracts by regular season Cap space estimated to be $18.6MM
As per Marc Berman, Spellman will be headed to Knicks training camp, although there has been no such confirmation about Evans, who is a candidate to be waived, especially since the Knicks currently have 16 players on NBA deals and can only enter the season with 15. For now though, they can have up to 20 players under some sort of contract, and when you add in the 2-way deals and lone Exhibit 10 contract, they are at 19.
The big four targets many fans had their eyes on all summer - Gallo, Davis Bertans, Joe Harris, Christian Wood and Jerami Grant - all got big money deals elsewhere.
Other Knicks targets that went off the board: D.J. Augustin (three years, $21 million to the Bucks), Jeff Teague (one year vet minimum with Boston), Rajon Rondo (two years, $15 million from Atlanta), Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (three years, $40 million to the Lakers), RFA De’Anthony Melton (four years, $35 million with Memphis) RFA Malik Beasley (four years, $60 million from Minnesota), Justin Holiday (three years, $18 million in Indiana) and Carmelo Anthony (one year, unknown terms to Portland). Kenny Wooten also got one of Houston’s two-way spots, and old friends Bobby Portis and Moe Harkless wound up on one-year deals in Milwaukee and Miami, respectively.
According to Marc Stein, Tom Thibodeau was persistent in his efforts to convince Gordon Hayward to join the Knicks on a shorter term deal than the four-year, $120 million pact he got from Charlotte.
Fred VanVleet agreed to a 4-year, $85 million deal with the Raptors. As has been reported elsewhere, and as I have intimated several times and wrote on Saturday, my understanding is that VanVleet never remotely had any interest in coming to New York. There is no indication they ever wanted or received a meeting, as some were reporting he would on Friday night.
Bogdan Bogdanovic signed a four year, $72 million offer sheet with Atlanta. Many Knick fans are wondering why the Knicks didn’t kick the tires here. Other than the fact that it takes two to tango, I can say that I’ve never heard his name brought up as a possible target. Regardless, I’m not sure he’s someone anyone should be upset about not being able to pay $18 million a year.
John Wall requested a trade from Washington according to Shams. I wrote about this on Saturday.
Lastly, Marc Berman had several nuggets in his weekend wrap up, including that D.J. Augustin was their original fallback option but they didn’t want to go three-years, they would have paid Fred VanVleet what he got from Toronto, that they tried to get Hayward on a two-year deal, and that Obi Toppin’s NBA readiness was part of the reason New York drafted him.
Tweet of the Late Night/Early Morning
Listen (and Watch!)
Another plug here for the re-launched KFS YouTube channel. The latest pod is out, but also up for you to watch. I’d take a moment to check out Jeremy’s live reaction as his Mike Conley master plan go up in smoke as we learn in real time that the Knicks had signed Austin Rivers:
Ask Macri
I’m cheating a little bit today, and asking myself a version of the question I feel like I’ve gotten the most over the course of the weekend, and using it as an opportunity to vamp a bit on the Knicks’ newest acquisitions (and one re-acquisition)
Is this really worth being excited about? I mean, what’s the difference between this offseason and last one? It’s still a bunch of one year guys, none of which are all that great. Isn’t calling this a success putting a bit too much lipstick on the pig?
At first glance, not as much as you’d like, but upon close inspection, it’s like night and day.
For starters, while New York may have come out of this week without converting their cap space into any first round picks, they did add four future seconds to their total, netting one on draft night, two in the Ed Davis trade, and another in the deal to flip Davis to Minnesota last night. This may seem disappointing, but we’ve seen, it’s no longer enough to inherit bad money and come away with a first; you need to have a decent player to send back (like Danny Green in the Al Horford-to-OKC dump) and unfortunately, the Knicks had no one to rise to that level.
Now before we get to the players New York acquired, let’s take a second to remember the primary issues last year’s team had: not enough ball movement (or playmaking in general), a dearth of functional shooting (they had guys who could shoot, but because of lineup necessity or coaching decisions, those players rarely saw the floor in significant enough combinations to actually provide spacing for the offense), and lastly, an over-reliance on individual shot creation from players who weren’t particularly efficient shot creators.
Aside from fixing these things, this regime was tasked with walking a delicate tight rope where the key young players were concerned: put them in positions to be successful while also giving them the chance to do most of the heavy lifting. This is more complicated than it looks, and there’s a misnomer that it was as simple as getting more shooters on the floor. Shooting is important, but it’s not everything.
Case in point: RJ Barrett’s most successful partner last season, at least by the team’s offensive rating when they played together, was Elfrid Payton, who can’t shoot a lick. Yes, Payton didn’t get the ball to Barrett as much as anyone would have liked (I’ll address that issue below), but there’s an argument that the biggest part of a young player’s growth is simply being part of a functional unit at each end.
For as much as everyone wants more of RJ and Frank this season, that pairing was wiped off the floor to the tune of a negative 11.0 net rating. When you added Mitch - New York’s ultimate lineup elixir last season in most situations, the numbers got even worse. Point is, sometimes combos you want to work don’t, and it comes down to benefiting the greater good: helping your key guys grow while not getting shellacked on a nightly basis.
With all that in mind, let’s look at who they got:
Alec Burks
Burks is an actualized version of what Alonzo Trier was supposed to be: a guy who can create shots for you while also helping keep up the flow of the offense. As I noted on Saturday, his assist rate is elite for wings, and his three-ball is good enough that defenses have to pay attention to it. It also doesn’t take much for him to get it off. While he’s probably best off as a bench piece on this team, if he winds up starting alongside Barett, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
Fun Facts: According to Cleaning the Glass, Burks has been in the top 20th percentile among wings for assist percentage four time in his nine year career: twice in Utah, once in Cleveland, and last year in Golden State. He’s also elite at getting to the line, ranking in the top 20th percentile in shooting fouls drawn every season of his career.
Nerlens Noel
Nerlens Noel is like a smaller version of Mitch, which is great because it means the game plan won’t go to hell if and when Robinson gets into foul woes. As I wrote last month, anytime the Knicks did something good on offense, the common denominator was Robinson, and when he was out, things usually fell off a cliff. Replacing Gibson’s minutes with another vertical threat like Noel should make for a significant improvement, especially when we consider their similarities not only on offense, but defense as well.
Fun Facts: Two NBA players saw at least 1000 minutes of time last season and finished with at least 140 points per 100 shot attempts, and the Knicks now have both of them - Robinson (145.7) and Noel (141.5)
Omari Spellman
Spellman is just two years removed from being taken with the last pick in the first round of the 2018 NBA draft. He’s spent one season each in Atlanta and Golden State, and the thing that stands out the most is his ability to stretch the floor as a big. After shooting 34.4 percent from deep as a rookie, he upped that number to 39.1 percent last season. His long midrange diet was a bit more than you’d like to see last year with the Warriors (15 percent), but other than that his shot profile is what you want.
Fun Facts: Spellman didn’t take many shots from the corners last year, but he was deadly when he did, making 11 of 20 attempts. That made him the most accurate big in the entire NBA from the corners.
Jacob Evans
Evans was the 28th pick in the draft two years ago, and like Spellman, spent his initial time in the league with Golden State (it’s kind of funny that both him and Omari ended up in Minnesota, but got there in separate transactions). Evans hasn’t been particularly good, sporting a 38.2 effective field goal percentage as an NBA player, and is already on the older side (23, like Spellman).
Austin Rivers
I’m going to keep it short on Rivers for now, for a couple reasons:
I have a feeling he’s going to play a significant role on this team, and unlike Noel and Burks, his game and potential impact - both for better and for worse - is a little more complex, so I’m going to save it for its own column at some point soon.
For as good or bad as Rivers may be (and I think he’ll be quite good for the Knicks), his contract is really the lead story here.
Somehow, the Knicks got Rivers - who has played meaningful minutes in several deep playoff runs over the course of his career - to sign for $10 million over three years, the last two of which are non-guaranteed. In a cash strapped league, that contract could have immense value as a trade chip down the line.
Fun Fact: His 3-point shooting has also been at or about 37 percent in three of the last four seasons, including 47 percent from the corners last year on 60 attempts.
Elfrid Payton
I know…was this really the best we could do? I mean…Elfrid Effing Payton? F’real?
Twitter caught itself a body on Saturday after I suggested it wasn’t a terrible idea to bring back Payton for one year, $5 million to ostensibly serve as the starting point guard (although with the addition of Rivers, I suspect we’re going to see Thibs get creative with the lineups he runs out in terms of who winds up doing the ball handling).
I get it. It sucks to watch a point guard who you know isn’t capable of throwing the ball in the ocean from the beach. But there’s no denying the offensive improvement when he was on the court last year - plus 8.2 points per 100 possessions, which was in the 95th percentile league-wide for any position - and the team’s other major additions this offseason will all help juice the offense even further.
Yes, the buddy-buddy routine with Julius Randle has to stop, and I can say with some degree of certainty that Randle has been involved in trade discussions all week long. I do not believe he is long for this team.
Regardless, Tom Thibodeau needed a reliable point guard to run his offense (I’m sorry, but neither Frank nor DSJ qualify, nor would any late first round rookie have had they picked one) and Payton appears to be the best guy they could get who was willing to come on a one-year deal. That flexibility is arguably New York’s best asset right now, and unless something too good to be true pops up, maintaining it is important. At the very least, the other available options - Shabazz Napier, Reggie Jackson, Yogi Ferrell, Isaiah Thomas - aren’t appreciably better to the point of outweighing the continuity value alone.
And really, ask yourself this: if Payton being back is really the worst thing about this offseason, do Knicks fans have any right to complain?
Fun Fact: Over 535 possessions last season, lineups featuring Elf, Randle, Mitch and RJ had a positive 7.8 net rating and scored 115.0 points per 100 possessions.
Go Swamp Rats!
252 days.
That’s a lot of time to build up a number of emotions, from anticipation to curiosity to uncertainty to excitement to outright dread.
And at one time or another, in the 252 days between when the Knicks last played a game and when they made their first move of this offseason - trading the 27th and 38th picks in this draft to move up to 23, the first of a dozen or so transactions that have given us a clue as to how Leon Rose will operate - we’ve felt every one of those emotions at least once, and most of them several times.
As a result, this offseason turned into the ultimate powder keg. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to get, but we were pretty sure we were going to get…well, something.
And now, in the 120 hours since that first move, we can look back on the last five days and see a team that has acted in a way that is wholly unfamiliar to any Knicks fan, whether they be five or fifty.
They’ve been normal.
Well, normal for a team in New York’s position, at least.
The Knicks, you see, are bad. I have used this descriptor here before, and while we’re all honest enough to embrace it to an extent, by virtue of the fact that we are New Yorkers with a superiority complex running through our veins, we always hold the faint, subconscious hope that the Knicks are just a few moves away from respectability, if not outright decency.
It doesn’t matter how illogical this is or how many consecutive years our hopes and dreams have been beaten into a pulp. We’re the coastal elite, dammit. Good things must eventually come our way.
But what if we weren’t the New York Knicks? What if, instead, we were the Sioux Falls Swamp Rats - a team that entered the NBA in 2000 that owns the worst record in the league since that time?
The Swamp Rats have a new front office, a new coach, some positive buzz, and a few promising pieces, but no one that is a consensus top 100 player in the league, nor one that everyone agrees will ever become as much.
The Rizzos (as the locals affectionately refer to them) just watched several similarly desultory teams attempt to spend their way up from the sewers into cleaner waters of mediocrity, overpaying role players to leave their existing franchises and attempt to hit above their weight class. Other targets rebuffed the Swamp Rats’ best offers in favor of better teams - some on lucrative deals, like preferred point guard target D.J. Augustin, and others on minimum pacts, like backup plan Jeff Teague.
This really shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, this is Sioux Fucking Falls. It shouldn’t be a shock to anyone that Fred VanVleet didn’t want to touch this franchise with a 10-foot pole, overpay or no overpay, or that Gordon Hayward and his people used the organization as little more than a pawn in their master plan to grab the bag.
Given the clear writing on the wall, the front office team (the “Rat Pack,” as they jokingly refer to themselves) did the best they could. They took the consensus best player available at 8. They manufactured better draft position out of thin air. They dealt out for a better long term asset when the guy they wanted was gone. They acquired a bevy of future picks. They didn’t overspend to appease an occasionally unhinged owner. They made smart signings on the margins for players who could actually be flipped for assets (i.e., not $15 million worth of Bobby Portis). They’ve left themselves the flexibility to pounce if the right opportunity arises.
In short, they did what any small market team would do in their position. Most importantly though, unlike past regimes who thought that players would simply walk into their cap space if it was open - seriously, have you been to Sioux Falls? - the front office has been doing the dirty work to improve internally, finally installed a player development program that has a chance of working. They realized: to make Sioux Falls look good, we have to work extra hard to get our young players better so that we can either gets stars to come play with them or trade them for stars down the line.
They know that because they recognize that past overpays and overreactions haven’t led anywhere good. Internal improvement buttressed by opportunistic moves, however, is the way to go. Otherwise, the Swamp Rats have no chance of competing against teams that either already have stars, play in desirable markets, or both.
And that’s the reality of the situation. New York might be New York to you and me, but it may as well be Sioux Falls to the rest of the NBA. The last five days have proven it, and thankfully, the people making the decisions aren’t hiding from that truth.
This was the easy part though. Acting like a normal, competent, bad team feels like a minor miracle to some, but it is the lowest reasonable bar. Now comes the challenge of actually turning a burgeoning asset base - a significant pick surplus over the next three seasons, some interesting young talent, flexibility, and a few decent trade pieces - into something worth noticing.
After 252 days of wondering, the last five have been reassuring, even if they may not feel like it at first. Let’s hope it keeps up.
GOOOOOOOOO Swamp Rats!!!! That’s it for today. If you’re not a paid subscriber and want to change that to get this newsletter every day, click here:
See everyone tomorrow with another edition. Sorry today’s was so late! #BlackLivesMatter
Your case in point is actually exactly why they should have used that second round choice this year on someone like Cassius Winston. I'll argue, at least until proven otherwise, that the difference in results from different lineups does come down to having someone get people the ball in the right spot. Frank's value is his ability to stop the other teams PG from running their offence. That's a skill worth covering for. He also shoots well from three if he's allowed to limit his shots to the locations he's mastered.
The problem with your positive net rating arguments is that the offense was run by Payton, RJ and Randle last year. It just isn't saying anything to be the best of the three.
I can't look back at any of the FA deals signed and feel like I would have wanted to bid any higher. I also don't see any way to create a good winning team even if we cherry picked the best deals signed so far. All you could ever ask is that they make the right decision every time one is presented and wait for the right opportunity. They've done that.
The next challenge is keeping enough cap space to make a big move during the season.
As far as how long it takes to turn things around. It usually takes a long time for the opportunity to present itself but it doesn't take long. Even the amazing Spurs dynasty of "incredible player development was built in 2 days when they got the first pick in the draft.
Miami poofed into existence with moves for Riley, Lebron, Wade and Bosh.
The slow build is the illusion.
Create a team of complimentary players that would inspire multiple stars to join you at the same time, as well as some additional trade assets, and wait.
Ironically Austin Rivers is an actual swamp rat.