Busy Weekend

Plus, we officially launch a very special summer series for the KFS Newsletter.

Good morning! Very busy day here, but before we get to today’s newsletter, a quick announcement:

This week will officially kick off the summer schedule for the KFS Newsletter, which means three editions per week instead of the usual five for the next two months (barring additional newsletters for breaking news, of course). As for what this summer will entail, I’ll have full details on that below. First though, some news…

News & Notes

🏀 Moussa, we hardly knew ya.

After signing Dallas Mavericks’ restricted free agent center Moussa Cisse to an offer sheet on Saturday afternoon, the Mavs matched it late Friday night.

Not that it matters now, but this was a nifty little bit of business by the front office. The offer sheet didn’t contain much guaranteed money (partially guaranteed for the first year; non-guaranteed in year-two) but paid Cisse like a veteran with at least two years of service time (hence the $2.45 million salary in 2026-27). That’s about $265,000 more than Cisse’s minimum would have been coming off his rookie season, hence the incentive for him to sign.

The gamble that the Knicks made and ultimately lost is that the Mavs wouldn’t match the offer sheet because they already had 15 guaranteed contracts on their books, including full time centers Daniel Gafford and Dereck Lively II and recently acquired big man Santi Aldama. Now, they’ll need to waive someone (thus incurring a dead cap hit on their books) or make a trade.

It’s possible Cisse is the player they ultimately decide to waive, at which point the Knicks (or any other team) could sign him. Unless that happens though, New York is barred from trading for him for one year. For the Mavs, the move isn’t exactly a vote of confidence in Lively III, who has appeared in just 43 games over the last two years and hasn’t yet progressed to running as he recovers from multiple right foot surgeries¹.

For the Knicks, the biggest takeaway is that they’re still very much on the hunt for a third big man who they’ll be able to get for the vet minimum. Oscar Tshiebwe is a name to keep an eye on (h/t to the great Jeremy Cohen). It’s also possible they don’t fill the 14th roster spot this summer and hold an open competition in training camp.

🏀 New York concluded it’s Vegas residency much in the same fashion they began it, with a 110-88 loss to the Mavs. By the numbers, the Knicks were the worst team at Summer League, getting outscored by an average point differential of 13.6 across five games. They shot the lowest field goal percentage by a wide margin and were also last in 3-point percentage and free throw attempts, resulting in a scoring average of just 73.0 points - more than eight points below the next worst team.

On an individual level, no one really popped on Friday, although Pacome Dadiet did score a team-high 19 points. He finished as New York’s top scorer in Vegas at 15.3 points, but made just 16 percent of his threes. Tyler Nickel ended a bit cold (3-for-11 from deep), but leaves with the second most total 3-pointers at Summer League (19) on a 41.3 percent hit rate. I’ll take it. Jack Kayil played just 10 minutes and missed both of his shots, while Liam Robbins scored 14 points in 20 minutes. I’m still pulling for the big guy to get a camp invite.

🏀 Last but not least, it was a pretty cool weekend for your boys (and girl) at KFS.

Big thanks to our friends at Fanatics Fest and Knicks Twitter Day for hosting two outstanding events. Both saw Knicks fans out in full force, proving yet again that we are the best fan base in all of sports. The KFS spots from FF should be available soon, but in the meantime, I’ll say here that Deuce confirmed what has been my sneaking suspicion for months: he was never fully healthy after returning from sports hernia surgery. I’m now biased, but please sign that man to a contract extension.

Oh, and I hear there’s a pretty good documentary streaming now on Peacock called “The Effect: Knicks in ’26”. Highly recommend to anyone with the service.

The Knicks 100

Chugging an entire gallon of milk.

Walking from one hotel to another in the middle of cloudless Vegas afternoon.

Slighting Jalen Brunson.

Life is filled with bad ideas, and this summer is a perfect opportunity to add my own fraught one to the list: Ranking the Top 100 Knicks of all time.

Or should I say, re-ranking.

As long time readers of this newsletter may remember, I celebrated the NBA’s 75th season five years ago by counting down the Top 75 Knicks ever, from Pablo Prigioni at No. 75 all the way up to Patrick Ewing at No. 1.

On one hand, the experience was a fruitful one. Making the list not only forced me to learn more about Knicks history than I ever thought possible, but its also made me reconcile what exactly “greatness” means in the context of one team’s entire existence.

On the other hand, the entire project only reinforced my inherent belief that list-making is nothing more than fun fodder for discussion and debate. There is no possible way to definitively rank the greatest players in the history of a franchise any more than there’s a way to rank the top 100 soft cheeses or native birds of Madagascar.

And yet, I pored over this goddamn thing. Oh did I pore.

I ranked, and re-ranked, and then re-ranked another three dozen times, and then after I started writing the first entry and attempted to justify my order, I realized I’d completely botched the last third of the list, so I scrapped that part and basically did it from scratch.

And that was all so I could justify the list to myself. Forget about proving its worth to anyone else.

But I promise you: it was totally worth it. At the end of the day, stuff like this is fun. It’s a way to spark conversation, and better yet, the perfect opportunity to honor all of the important players who helped break a 53-year title drought. There’s also a few mistakes from the first time around that I’m looking forward to correcting.

Before we get to that, a word on what exactly I’ll be doing. Twice a week for the next nine weeks, I’ll be writing about a different Knick from the Leon Rose era. Most of these players weren’t here the last time I did this list, and few have either come and gone since I did the Top 75 or have joined/moved up in the rankings over that time. I’m expanding the list from 75 to 100 because I want to get to as many Knicks from the current roster as possible. Every time I write about a new Knick, I’ll include the ranking of the players immediately above them, right up to the next Knick I’ll be writing about (so for instance, if the first Leon Rose era Knick I’m writing about is ranked 100th, and the next one is ranked 85th, I’ll reveal the list up to 86 when I write about the 100th ranked player. I hope that makes sense.)

On that note: it should again go without saying that this is not an exact science. I did, however, compile a statistical database of where all 100 players ranked all time in certain categories throughout franchise history. Those categories are:

• Playoff minutes

• Playoff points

• Regular season minutes

• Regular season points

• Regular season win shares

• Regular season and postseason rebounds and assists where relevant

I also noted how many times each player started or came off the bench for a playoff team, and then how deep those teams made it into the postseason.

The goal of all this legwork wasn’t to come up with a points system that would spit out a list based on these specific inputs, but merely to give me a broad strokes idea of how much these players produced while they were Knicks, and more importantly, how much of that production occurred in the highest leverage games.

The end result - and here’s where we get to why this was a fraught idea to begin with - forced me to ask impossible questions with no right answers. For instance, how does one compare the following four players:

• Player 1: an 8th man on a Knick title team who elevated to 6th man by the end of the finals thanks to hitting several massive postseason shots, but because of injuries and lack of service time, barely ranks in the top 200 for regular season minutes and points

• Player 2: a 4th or 5th starter on multiple teams that made the second round who stuck around long enough to rank inside the top 60 for regular season minutes and points

• Player 3: a bench player who was arguably New York’s top dog when he was at his very best and who helped lead them to one postseason appearance, only to get smoked in the first round, with regular season minutes and points rankings around 100.

• Player 4: a key starter on multiple finals teams, including one season in which he made the All-Star team, but whose entire career took place before 1955.

In case you haven’t figured it out, these are the descriptions of four actual players who I ranked between 60 and 80 on the list (anyone who correctly guesses all four will get a shout out in the newsletter at the appropriate time).

Is there a right order for them? To heck if I know. Mostly, I just went with my gut, and that includes putting certain players higher or lower simply based on anecdotal evidence that may not be totally rooted in data.

With that caveat, four final notes on this process, and then we’ll kick off the list on Wednesday with our first entrant who (as of now, unless I change my mind) will check in at No. 100:

1. This time around, I was not as kind to players whose careers started in the 40’s or early 50’s and/or did not last far into the 60’s. This isn’t my way of agreeing with JJ Redick’s “plumbers and firemen” comment, but I do think less deference should be given to players who a) played before the league was fully integrated and b) didn’t treat the NBA (or BAA in some cases) as a “profession” as we now understand it. My justification is simple: when the NBA did their top 75 list five years ago, only five of the 75 entrants had careers that ended before 1969. If the voters for that list gave a slight demerit to the accomplishments of the NBA’s pioneers, I will too.

2. Speaking of eras, for reasons I can’t really explain, I was far too ignorant of many prominent Knick role players that came along after the title teams but before Riley arrived. There were some lean years in there and they never made the conference finals, but New York did make the playoffs in half of the 16 years from 1976 to 1991. I’ve worked hard to correct that this time around.

3. Playing and producing for teams that made it deep into the playoffs (and even simply into the second round) mattered more to me this time around. Postseason accomplishments mattered a lot to me last time, but five years ago I also found myself deferring to gaudy if ultimately meaningless regular season numbers (hello, Al Harrington at No. 61. Oof). This time around, only eight of the 100 inclusions never made the playoffs in a Knick uniform, and all had good reasons for consideration over and above simply putting up numbers (sorry, Al). Call this my recency bias of having not only watched the 2026 playoffs, but the last four postseasons, all of which reinforced how playoff basketball truly is a different sport with exponentially more pressure. That should be appropriately rewarded.

4. I gave more preference to players who were, to use a colloquial term, “dudes” on their respective teams. I.e., if someone did his fair share of heavy lifting for a successful team, I bumped them up a bit. If I was able to parse out whether they drove that winning, all the better, but I’m also not comfortable being the arbiter on such things. I tried to lean on advanced stats an appropriate amount for this.

That’s about it. There’s only one thing left to do, and that’s get to my highly imperfect ranking of the 100 greatest Knicks of all time.

The fun starts on Wednesday.

🏀

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

1. Yes, I did the math. Just in terms of incoming/outgoing money, if the Knicks swapped out Dadiet and Deuce for Lively, they’d have enough to sign Nickel and Kayil to minimum deals and still remain under the second apron. That said, I’d be shocked on multiple levels if this happened.