Briefing: May 17
The Draft Combine. Should the Knicks trade back?
Good Morning,
The Knicks are in Chicago meeting with prospects at the 2019 draft combine. They have met with 10 of the maximum 20 prospects. Here are the prospects we know they have met with so far:
Kevin Porter Jr., USC
Jarrett Culver, Texas Tech
Cam Reddish, Duke
Ja Morant, Murray State
RJ Barrett, Duke
RJ Barrett prefers to play with the Knicks or Lakers, according to Marc Berman.
RJ Barrett was asked what he hopes to improve over the next few months as he gets ready for the NBA: “Everything! Because no one is perfect in one area of their game...So just continue to work to be a complete player.” [Stadium]
Great meeting with Morant: While Ja Morant will likely go to Memphis, he sounded excited about his meeting with the Knicks: "I learned a lot about them and they learned a lot about me." [Chris Iseman]
Some members of the Knicks front office are high on Jarrett Culver, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will take him with the third pick, or there is consensus within the front office about his potential, as reported by Ian Begley.
Trade the pick? Chris B. Haynes of Yahoo says that despite the Knicks not winning the lottery, “the plan is still going on as scheduled” in looking to trade their #3 pick and add two max free agents.
If you were hoping Zion would hold out…
Knicks Hype: As you would expect, the Knicks were the most mentioned team on Twitter during Lottery night. The overall volume of tweets was 4x higher than last year.
Congrats to Knicks Film School affiliate Knicks Fan TV for hitting 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. Make sure you are subscribed!
Salary Cap Update
Bobby Marks confirmed the guarantee date for Lance Thomas to earn $1 million in 2019-20 is June 30. This means the Knicks can waive him before that date to relieve themselves of his entire $7.5 million cap hit.
That $1 million makes a difference if the Knicks want to keep all of their young players, including Allonzo Trier, while preserving two max spots. As it stands now, they would be only ~$129,000 short of doing so, which could be made up when the official 2019 cap number is released.
Root for Game 7s: Since the 2019 salary cap is based on revenue earned by the league, Knicks fans should root for each of the remaining playoff series to reach Game 7.
Higher playoff revenue = Higher 2019 cap = More cap space for the Knicks to spend beyond max free agents.
An increase of $1 million equates into only $300,000 more for a Durant max.
Vegas likes the Knicks in 2020
Should the Knicks trade down?
by Jonathan Macri
It’s now been two and a half days since the Knicks landed third in Tuesday’s Draft Lottery, and if you had to guess at this point whether their intention was to keep or try and trade the pick, the evidence points to the latter.
Why? Let’s take a look...
Chris B. Haynes of Yahoo reported as much yesterday.
The rumors are still flying that they intend to be fully in the Anthony Davis sweepstakes.
Mills and Perry haven’t spoken to the media, which would seem to make sense if they had no intention of coming out and saying something nice about the kid everyone has going third, and...
The Knicks have been meeting with a whole bunch of prospects not named RJ Barrett, including Cam Reddish, Jarrett Culver and Kevin Porter Jr. (although as Jonathan Wasserman pointed out yesterday, everyone meets with everyone at the combine. Still, it’s not nothing...)
What does it all mean? Simply that the Knicks haven’t made up their mind as to what they’re going to do yet and are keeping their options open. While I certainly wouldn’t rule out them taking Barrett, I continue to have questions about his fit next to two ball-dominant max vets as a rookie without an NBA-ready outside shot. AD looms, and will continue to loom until draft night.
The most interesting thing for me between now and June 20 will be thinking of other possible alternatives to those two scenarios, one of which includes trading down to acquire more assets - and potentially players who fit better with the team they may hope/think/plan on taking the Garden floor next year.
Enter Atlanta. Berman and Bondy both reported around the trade deadline that the Knicks and Hawks had trade discussions, ostensibly regarding Frank Ntilikina. Coincidentally, Atlanta is now the only team to hold multiple selections inside the top 10 this year - their own eighth pick and Dallas’ tenth.
On its face, there’s the framework of a deal that could be made, but there are a lot of complicating factors at play:
Would the Hawks even be interested in Barrett? The trend in the NBA now more than ever is that you need two guys who are comfortable having the ball in their hands a lot. At least one (and ideally both) of those players should also have value off-ball. Trae Young not only fits that bill, but at his size, it’s probably not a great idea to have him doing all the heavy lifting for the Hawks moving forward anyway. Would Barrett fit as their other ball handler? They pass it a ton (10th in assists per game last year) so they’d need to have the confidence in him working significantly on his tunnel vision, but that’s probably true of any team.
By the same token, how useful would Barrett really be alongside KD and either Kyrie Irving or Kemba Walker? Someone needs to be Chris Bosh (uber-garbage-man) or Klay Thompson (elite shooter). Barrett profiles as neither. As I wrote right after the lottery, so much of what the Knicks do with this pick comes down to how they see their chances in free agency.
Is 8 and 10 enough value for 3? At first blush, the answer is “no,” simply because, as I trumpeted from the rooftops Tuesday night, there’s a significant drop off after 3 in this draft. Here’s the thing though: as Wasserman noted on Howard Beck’s podcast this week, there’s not a lot of difference between 4 and 11. Also, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We can be pretty certain at this point that Scott Perry doesn’t care what the “safe” choice is; he’s going to do what he thinks best, and if he loves a guy in the lower range, he’ll go with his gut.
Is this necessarily a bad idea? The Patriots have mastered the art of taking multiple bites at the apple, and understand that in a glorified craps shoot, the more attempts you have, the better your odds will be. That logic doesn’t always hold true in the NBA though, because when you have a true star on your hands, no collective grouping of lesser assets can provide equal value.
Is Barrett such a star? The bust rate on top-three picks is higher than you might think, and recently, several seemingly sure things - Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Jahlil Okafor, Markelle Fultz, and Josh Jackson, to name a few - have gone belly up. The Knicks were reportedly high on Donovan Mitchell...imagine if they had an extra dart to throw at the board? If getting both Cam Reddish and Nas Little - the consensus 3rd and 4th ranked pre-season prospects - were possible, would they pull the trigger? What about Gonzaga’s duo, both of whom appear far more NBA ready? Would Culver or Hunter skipping farther than expected change the equation? I could do this all night...
Lastly, what if other players were involved to seal the deal? I wrote last week about the idea of trading for Taurean Prince, Atlanta’s small forward who may have fallen out of favor with the Hawks. He had an uneven season but still has a lot of tools that would make him an interesting flier, and there’s a chance Atlanta may not want to pay him as a restricted free agent next summer.
So much of this will obviously come down to the Knicks assessment of Barrett, as well as other teams’ opinions of Duke’s other star. Regardless of where they end up on him, New York should have more than a few options open to them heading into what promises to be an eventful evening on June 20.
Remember when…
May 17, 1995: Patrick Ewing’s short running jumper with :01.8 left brings the Knicks back from the edge of extinction and keeps them alive in the Eastern Conference Semifinals with a 96-95 victory over the Pacers in Game Five at Madison Square Garden. [Vivek Dadhania with more]
Thanks for reading, talk to you on Monday!