Briefing: June 17
The Anthony Davis trade. Allonzo Trier's team option.
Good Morning,
The Knicks exercised their team option on Allonzo Trier on Friday. The undrafted guard will earn $3.5 million in 2019-20. He will then become a restricted free agent again in 2020, and the Knicks will have his Early-Bird rights.
New York had a variety of avenues to bring back Trier next season.
They could have declined his option, and instead, extended him a qualifying offer of $4.2M to make him a restricted free agent. This would have given them more time to decide if they wanted his salary on their books after they see how the free agent landscape plays out a bit. They would have had until 7/13 to rescind the qualifying offer. The risk is that another team could have extended an offer sheet to Trier, which would put the Knicks at risk of paying more than the $3.5 million team option or $4.2 million qualifying offer, and would have locked in Trier for at least two seasons, if they still wanted him back.
New York could have also turned Trier into an unrestricted free agent, and later tried to bring him back using cap space (they might have plenty of it if they don’t land two max players), or using their Room Exception of up to $4.8 million. Of course, they would have lost control in whether or not they get to keep him under this scenario.
Long story, short, the Knicks were able to keep Trier at a cost-effective rate (relative to RFA/UFA) and on reasonable terms (one more year leading to Early-Bird rights), and they even gain the flexibility of being able to trade him before 6/30, since his contract is no longer ending this summer.
How does this impact the Knicks cap space?
By exercising Trier’s option, the Knicks are projected to have up to $69.8 million in cap space, which would leave them about $130,000 short of being able to sign Kevin Durant and an additional max-salary player. However, the Knicks have > $5 million cushion if they want to sign two max-salary players with 7-9 years of NBA experience, such as Kawhi Leonard and Kemba Walker. Durant earns a higher percentage of the cap as a veteran with more than 10 years of experience.
Lance Thomas
Ian Begley reports the Knicks are expected to waive Lance Thomas before his $1 million guarantee date on June 30 (Begley also notes the Knicks are interested in re-signing him as a free agent). A few notes on Thomas:
If the Knicks waive Thomas before 6/30, they can sign him back as a free agent for as little as $2.3M in 2019-20. The Knicks could also waive him after his guarantee date and still re-sign him as a free agent, as long as they don’t negotiate a reduction in the $1 million he would then be owed or decide to stretch that amount. Since Thomas is an 8-year veteran with at least four years of service with the Knicks, he would be eligible for a no-trade clause if he re-signs.
Since Thomas was signed under the previous CBA, his full $7.1M would count as outgoing salary in a trade before 6/30. The receiving team could immediately waive him at $0 cap cost. This allows the Knicks to use Thomas as salary filler in a trade without passing on a cap cost to the receiving team. Had Thomas been signed under the new CBA, only $1M would count as outgoing salary in a trade before 6/30.
The Anthony Davis Trade
Anthony Davis was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers over the weekend for a boatload of assets that included Lonzo Ball, Brandon Ingram, Josh Hart, and three first round picks (including the 4th overall pick in 2019).
The Knicks never made a formal offer to New Orleans for Davis during the final round of talks, per Marc Berman: “The sense is the Knicks believed they could not match the demands of the Pelicans and essentially backed off.”
As reported by Ian Begley, whether or not the Knicks had enough assets in the Pelicans eyes to swing a trade, the Knicks were uncomfortable giving up significant assets in a potential deal.
More from Jonathan Macri:
So I have this running DM conversation with a national NBA writer who occasionally gets under the skin of Knicks fans. Usually, he'll message me after he's sent out what he feels is a fair tweet and has received what he deems to be overly harsh replies.
His argument is always the same: Don't kill the messenger.
And in fairness, I get it. We can be a sensitive bunch at times. We're New Yorkers; being defensive is part of our DNA.
But it's more than that. As fans, we often feel like this franchise will be the butt of jokes no matter what, and Saturday night was Example A of that phenomenon. As I was scrolling through my feed, there were two distinct reactions to the AD trade where the Knicks were concerned: that of non-Knick fans, who noted that not getting Davis cemented New York as the losers of this offseason, and that of Knick fans, who were counting their lucky stars Scott Perry and Steve Mills didn't make this trade.
That latter view is 100% right, by the way. You could argue this was a necessary trade for the Lakers, who should have a shot at a ring or two over the next few years depending on health and what they do with the rest of their cap space. If AD retires a Laker, they almost certainly do not regret making this deal.
It also has a possibility to end up as one of the most lopsided trades in NBA history should Davis leave next summer, or really, at any point before he turns 30. If you're the Lakers, with a 34-year-old LeBron, you kind of had no choice, and there's a real, cognizable ceiling there in the immediate future. You make the trade, even with the bitter taste it leaves in your mouth.
The Knicks? For the Knicks, both the ceiling and the floor would have been considerably lower. It's why I wrote 10 days ago in this space that for all of his prodigious talents, I was ultimately against a Davis trade unless they also had a guarantee from a star to come along with him (and even then, had they given up this haul of picks and swaps, I don't know that I could have gotten behind it).
Without a second star in tow? The disaster potential would have been off the charts. Assuming Kawhi didn't join the Brow in New York - and we've gotten zero indication that acquiring AD would have made a difference to Leonard one way or another - the Knicks would be left to try and go all in with a competitive roster around Davis. That likely would have meant overspending (both in years and dollars) on good but not great players. If AD left after a year to go to LA - a possibility that would have dominated every headline for literally twelve months, the local media would have made sure of that - the Knicks would be left positioned as poorly as perhaps any franchise in the league: bad contracts, no youth, no picks, zero hope.
That very real scenario is why, if the Knicks had traded an LA-like package for Davis on Saturday night, all of those same people who used this bypassed opportunity as a chance to make fun of the Knicks would have used the completed trade as a chance to make fun of the Knicks. The messaging would just have been a little different; New York wold have gone from "Losers of the AD Sweepstakes" to "Classic Knicks," or "LOL Knicks," if you prefer.
Any way you slice it, the moment Davis got traded, the Knicks were going to be the butt of jokes, and that's what some people don't get about why fans are the way we are.
It's why, barring New York somehow landing the recently named Finals MVP in a few weeks, the Knicks are going to be deemed losers of this summer regardless of the approach they take. Sign an injured KD? Pair up Jimmy Butler and Kemba Walker? Take on bad contracts for draft picks? It doesn't matter. The reaction will be the same.
That's the media culture that we live in though, and it's not changing. No one writes a "Winners, Kind of winners, Neither Winners nor Losers, Sort of Losers, and Losers" column for a major sports site. You succeed or you die. Matthew Miranda did a beautiful job of detailing why this mentality is a complete farce where the Knicks are concerned this summer, but such arguments take brain power to digest and can't fit into 280 characters or less, so it will be bypassed in the larger parlance. Such is life in 2019.
The popular narrative that will absolutely persist between now and the end of free agency (and probably beyond) is that the Knicks set themselves up for this "win or lose" dichotomy the moment they traded Kristaps Porzingis, but that too is a good bit of misdirection.
In the NBA as in life, you're either paralyzed by the moment or you make the best decision possible given the facts available. The facts the Knicks had in February are that Kristaps Porzingis was not all in on a long term partnership (and if you believe his distaste for the organization is a completely contrived Knicks PR-invented narrative or that they ultimately pushed him out the door more than he wanted out, a) go back and read Stef Bondy's own reporting from early on in the season and b) I have a bridge to sell you at an amazing discount). At that moment, you had to make a decision: try to get whatever birds in hand you could scrounge up (and from the reporting we've had, there were no great birds to be had) or go for the bush. They went for the bush.
Was that foolish? Hindsight is always 20/20, but based on everything being reported at the time, to not do so would have been organizational malpractice. That they got an interesting young player and picks out of the deal was icing on the cake, and the cap space doesn't turn into a pumpkin at midnight on July 1.
Regardless of what happens several weeks from now, you either think the decision-making process behind that trade was sound or it wasn't. All fans of this team have ever wanted was a front office that has some process that doesn't involve shooting from the hip with a water pistol. Sitting out the Davis trade is the latest piece of evidence that this is, in fact, the case.
And if, a month from now, the Knicks are sitting with some bad expiring contracts, a few one-year deals, and a war chest of picks, we'll know it to be that much more true, even though the narrative will almost certainly be the opposite.
Which will be more than fine. After all, we're used to it by now.
25 Years Ago Today
As OJ Simpson was speeding down a Los Angeles freeway, the Knicks put themselves one win away from a championship. Anthony Mason and Hakeem Olajuwon nearly exchanged blows, and NBC missed it for their OJ coverage. [Vivek Dadhania with more]
Thanks for reading, talk to you tomorrow!