July 1 Briefing
So we didn't get Kevin Durant
Good Afternoon,
We have a lot to cover so let’s just dive right in…
After signing Julius Randle, Bobby Portis, Reggie Bullock, Taj Gibson, and Wayne Ellington, the Knicks have approximately $11.5 million in remaining cap space. The detailed numbers on each signing are not yet available, but I made a best guess based on the contract total and assuming 5% annual increases. This puts the Knicks less than $1 million of the minimum payroll requirement. The Knicks also have the $4.8 million room exception available to them.
KFS Podcast: Therapy
The day of reckoning has come. After Jon goes on a little rant, he's joined by actor David Futernick to help him process the KD news (26:20), by writer extraordinaire Robert Silverman to get some big picture perspective (41:20), and finally by Knick Film School himself Jeffrey Bellone, where they both learn the news of Dolan nixing the max deal to KD and Julius Randle signing with the Knicks in real time (1:05:30). Stay till the end...you won't regret it.
Break it all down, Mr. Macri
So, full disclosure: I started writing this article last week. And it's been in my head for a few weeks. Months, if we're being honest.
I've said it on the pod for months: This is a guy who proclaimed ad nauseam throughout his career that he’s just, ya know...a different kinda’ cat. That he doesn’t care about what the fans think. That he just wants to hoop in the best environment possible. Why should we have assumed that he would care about getting to wear the cape as the man who saved the Knicks?
You know who thought saving the Knicks meant something to Kevin Durant? Us – the people who wanted Kevin Durant to save the Knicks.
Once you get past that and accept the facts, the decision isn’t altogether surprising. This is a superstar athlete with a huge ego. I’m quite certain he thinks he can elevate the Nets to prominence in a city where (Silvio Dante voice) all due respect, they’ll always be second fiddle. In fact, nothing about this is surprising.
The guy wanted to live in New York. He wanted to go to a team that was more ready to win right now, with a system that had already born fruit, and a GM who has the league singing his praises. He wanted to play in a place that is, by all accounts, a good working environment. They jump off the bench when you do something good. Fun for the whole family.
Most of all though, he wanted to play with his buddy. As Howard beck wrote today, "Durant and Irving were going to play together, somewhere, in 2019. That's what they resolved over a series of conversations before this season even began, according to knowledgeable sources."
Once Kyrie decided that place was going to be Brooklyn, for the logical reasons noted above, that was that. Woj’s statement this morning that the Knicks didn’t ever really get to negotiate with Durant because Kyrie had already made up his mind supports this fact, as did the very clear assertion that the Dolan/medical records issue was not the reason he didn't come. As Woj said, the front office would have pushed Dolan on the issue if it ever got that far. It didn't.
KD didn’t want to go at it alone, and Kyrie didn't either, even if it was for only one season. Beck noted that "neither Irving nor Durant were eager to wear the 'savior' mantle that's thrust upon every star player, coach or executive who lands at Madison Square Garden." And who can blame them? It's the heaviest burden in sports. Only a select few are built for it. These two - at least with only the Knicks' kids surrounding them - weren't.
Notably absent from Beck's story, however, was any reporting that the Knicks lack of culture or organizational ethos was part of this decision. That is a good sign.
It also doesn't mean the Dolan aspect of this story is null and void, because it most certainly isn't. It's arguably still the lead, and we’ll get there in a bit. But first, let’s get three things out of the way:
For those tempted to ask whether there was more the Knicks could have done since Scott Perry came aboard to be more like a serviceably bad unit and not a trash fire, remember: he arrived to a capped out team with a roster full of players nobody wanted very late in free agency in 2017. He made talent plays where he could, including spending the little cash he had last summer on Mario Hezonja. Would giving that money to some mystery vet have substantially altered the team's fortunes? Would pulling the plug on the Mudiay experiment earlier have made a difference? Would playing Knox less once his struggles reached a peak have helped? They're all fair questions...until you remember that NBA coaches aren't magicians. For all the critique this team has received over the last year, there's a reason nobody has gone hard after Fizdale's coaching. There wasn't much more he could have done, not to make up the gap between them and the Nets at least. And if they had won a few more games? Kiss RJ Barrett goodbye. So let's pause on all that noise before it starts.
This is a gut punch. It is. Just accept it. Every comment, tweet, post, email, back page or carrier pigeon note that shouts “Loooo-SERSSSS” squarely in our faces has a kernel of truth to it. Today we lost. And losing sucks. That being said...
Even with Beck's report (which I don't dispute), I stillbelieve there’s an alternate universe in which the Warriors’ medical staff does its job and Kevin Durant never plays in Game 5, and yesterday - maybe - goes entirely different. Maybe Kyrie and KD spend a little more time talking themselves into the idea of Mitch, RJ, Knox, etc. I doubt it, but it can't be ruled out.
Either way, we will never know how that alternate universe would have unfolded. All we have is what we are left with, and with it, a future that, if you squint hard enough, is kinda, sorta promising. It’s also undoubtedly different than the one many anticipated, either six days ago or six months ago.
That is where we have to go back to, one final time, if only because so many others inevitably will…
Kristaps Porzingis was, and still is, a generational talent. Some want to ignore this. I can’t, and won’t. When a franchise gets lucky enough to land such a player, it is on them to do everything in their power to try and keep him happy. The Knicks failed to do this. It was a symptom of the fact that when they drafted him, they were not a healthy organization. Regardless of who was to blame for that, that is an “L” they must take and live with.
Even good organizations have issues with star players though, and they work through them. The thinking goes that the Knicks decision to trade Kristaps was further evidence that they weren’t yet a fully stable organization. This isn’t wrong. What is wrong is thinking that their level of stability was ever going to change as long as Porzingis remained.
The relationship was dead. He didn’t want to be here, and by the end, they didn’t want him. The leverage they possessed dealt with contractual terms only. No amount of leverage could have repaired what was already broken.
The true irony, of course, is that the people who continue to pooh-pooh this inconvenient reality are the same ones who will keep critiquing the team as eternally doomed. It’s hard and painful to crawl up out of the pits of hell, and trading a generational star, even one who has recently suffered a major injury, was neither easy nor painless.
But it was the best chance they had to graduate from the type of organization that couldn’t hold onto a star player into one that could. If this seems like backwards, circular logic, ask yourself: if a team’s best player isn’t fully bought in, regardless of the terms of his contract, what chance is there that anyone else would be fully bought in as well?
Oh, and about all that leverage: if you think some team wouldn’t have happily handed a 2 + 1 max offer sheet to KP by the time you’re reading this, and that he wouldn’t have taken it in a heartbeat, I’ve got a bridge in KD’s new home to sell you. Of course he was never foolhardy enough to sign his qualifying offer, but he didn’t need to be. The Knicks would have matched, and it would have only been a matter of time until the exact same thing that happened on January 31 would have happened again: KP would have demanded a trade.
At that point, any leverage they had would have been lost. When they dealt him in February, they had more leverage than they ever would have at any point thereafter. Of course, they ended up using that leverage to open up a second max slot, one which has now been used on parts of Julius Randle, Bobby Portis, Taj Gibson, Reggie Bullock and #OAKAAK Wayne Ellington.
Randle, Portis, Gibson, Bullock, Elly (his new nickname, I've decided), lovely players all, are not in the same stratosphere as a healthy Kristaps.
(We’ll put aside for a moment that KP hasn’t played basketball in 17 months, has some, umm…“character” issues, and that the Mavs just handed him a max contract with zero injury protections, all whilst sending the Knicks two future first-round picks.)
The inconvenient truth is that what went out is better than what ended up coming in. Great. It doesn’t change the fact this was the best use of KP as a trade chip. To say otherwise is not only ignoring some reporting that has come out since but also ignores the rules of Blackjack (bear with me here).
Remember, the Knicks first attempted to use KP to acquire another young star. Calls were placed to both Sacramento and Utah about De’Aaron Fox and Donovan Mitchell, and each predictably turned the Knicks down. More such inquiries were likely made.
At that point, the Knicks had a choice to make the deal with Dallas or, more than likely, deal Porzingis for a lesser young player or players. Meanwhile, every media person worth their salt was reporting Kevin Durant to the Knicks was as done a deal as could be.
The Knicks were holding a nine and a ten and the dealer was showing a six. Could they still have lost? Of course…but the odds were as in their favor as one could ever feasibly imagine.
Did they actually lose? Yes…as I wrote, this is a loss, in no uncertain terms.
But while assessing the result here isn’t meaningless (we’ll get there in a bit), to say the process wasn’t sound is revisionist history. As fans of a team that has often had not any process whatsoever to speak of, this matters. A lot.
One last point before we move on to the present: if anything, there is an argument that a max contract should have been offered to KP at midnight on July 1, 2018. For all we know, the relationship might not yet have soured, and if ever there were a time for a make-good gesture, it would have been then.
It’s a fair critique…until you remember that one of Porzingis’ alleged concerns was over the team’s ability to build a winner around him. Keeping as much cap space available as possible was the clearest and easiest way to make that a reality. Regardless, it’s an alternative universe I’ll probably always wonder about.
The Knicks, however, had no such time to waste. The present was, and is, staring at them in the face, and with it, a valuable lesson: maybe you can’t suck for a year and expect the best players in the world to line up at your door to take your money.
Yes, a competent management team has now put the organization in a place to get meetings, and that has value. But to seal the deal, you need more. You need to be able to sell winning, or at least the illusion of winning in the near future. If we’ve learned nothing else this weekend, it’s that.
As I said, there was no realistic path to making this happen before this summer, not with where the Knicks were roster-wise when Scott Perry took over. But there is absolutely a path there now.
So far, that path includes two classic Perry moves in Julius Randle on a 3-year, $63 million contract (with a third year that is either a team option or carries a small guarantee) and Bobby Portis at two years, $31 million, plus another classic Perry move of an entirely different kind in Taj Gibson for two years and $20 million. The first two are bets on talent, the other a wager on leadership – both Perry staples.
This team needs each of these, but probably neither as much as they do shooting, which is where their last two acquisitions of Reggie Bullock (2 years, $21 million) and Wayne Ellington (2 years, $16 million) come in. Neither deal is bad for shooting wings to join a rebuilding outfit.
Do all these signings make sense in conjunction with one another? They might. Most of the boxes you'd ideally want to check - vet leadership, toughness, shooting - are checked. Really though, your opinion on these deals depends on how you feel about team building.
On that front, one thing is clear: there is no world where sucking ass at the level of ass-suckery (industry term) which occurred last season is a good thing. Lottery night taught us that, yes, if your young’ns can go out and win 35 game, by golly, let them go win 35 games. At this point it’s quite clear: if the one guy we all thought was going to come save the Knicks had no interest in saving the Knicks, well then I guess the Knicks had better do it themselves. That starts now.
Randle could help that effort immensely…or he could hurt it...or somewhere in between. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, he was as high a ceiling and low a floor player as there was in this free agent class. On one hand, he was one of seven players in the NBA this year – Giannis, Steph, Durant, KAT, Harden, and Kawhi were the others- that averaged over 20 points per game with at least a 60 true shooting percentage and a 25 usage rate. Those are Beast Mode numbers.
On the other hand, the advanced stats say he wasn’t entirely helpful to winning games, and although this is an area in which the metrics say he’s improved, there’s still a ton to be desired. His defense...oof(unless they switch more, in which case, slightly less oof).
Ditto for Bobby Portis, although his deep ball from the four or five spot will be an absolute necessity on a team that was fairly devoid of plus shooting. Throw in Bullock’s career 39% from long range and Ellington's 38%, and you can envision some configurations of this roster that suddenly become tough to guard.
But like Randle, Portis’ basketball IQ has been a severe question mark thus far in his career. The front office’s bet is that the coaching staff will be able to turn these lumps of clay that should theoretically be able to defend at a higher level than they’ve shown throughout their careers into serviceable components. It’s a risky gamble, and one that no doubt informed their signing of Taj Gibson, a player whose best days are behind him but who knows what to do and where to be on the floor.
Overall, there's reason for hope. Putting it into practice will be an entirely different matter. There are players who can defend and players who don’t. There are ones who can shoot and one’s can’t. Mixing and matching will be hard. Luckily, David Fizdale doesn’t have any hair left to pull out.
His biggest challenge will be finding time for everyone. We've heard him say repeatedly that he believes competition brings out the best in players, but how will that line play if a key young rotation player gets 10 or 12 minutes or God forbid a DNP-CD.
Looking at the roster, my gut is this won't come to pass too much. Dennis Smith Jr. is still the only pure point guard. We know how invested the organization is in RJ, Knox and Mitch. You know Iso Zo is gettin' minutes. Dotson and Frank (should he still be here, and after this deluge of signings, count me as skeptical, despite the coaching staff showing him love in Dallas last week) figure to be the ones with an uphill battle. "May the best man win" brought out the best in Dot last year, and one hopes that continues. We'll see what happens with Frank.
Was it the best expenditure of resources? As I discussed on Thursday, there’s no one right way to build a team. Is it to exclusively ink one and two-year deals, or to take the plunge and do the exact thing we’ve seemingly been praying doesn’t happen this summer and sign non-max guys to long term contracts? In the end they toed the line with Randle and veered safer with the other four. And really, what long term bargains were found in this marketplace? If you can see one, tweet me, because I sure can't.
In my ideal world, they probably take the money from either Portis or Randle and try to find a salary dump trade that nets them an asset. Thus far though, only one such deal has materialized, and something tells me after his recent comments about the Knicks, this front office was in no rush to trade for Andre Iguodala, even if he did come with a future pick. And in Randle, they got a legit lottery ticket with an All-Star ceiling. Should they have bypassed Portis, whose shooting might very well unlock some really potent lineups? Again, you can see why they just decided to sign both.
It doesn’t mean it’ll work. It’s time for David Fizdale to earn his paycheck. It's his job to wade through this uncertainty.
Durant was also uncertain, but a very different type of uncertainty, and one that would have brought the franchise an untold amount of instant legitimacy. Even knowing now that he was never a real option, just hearing that James Dolan even might have potentially played a hand in him not coming triggered a lot of people. Many of them happen to be members of the media with prominent national platforms. What a coincidence.
We can sit here and argue for days about whether it is responsible, arrogant, or somewhere in between for Dolan to have found religion now of all times with this medical records thing, but it ultimately didn't matter. Nor does it really bother me one way or the other if leaking it was a CYA move by the organization to soften the blow (which, not so ironically, it most certainly didn't)
Regardless, ask yourself: if yesterday transpired in exactly the way it did for any other team, who’s the one getting the blame?
But of course, this isn’t any team and this isn't any owner. It’s the Knicks and James Dolan. Dolan, who went on a radio show and raised a “Mission Accomplished” banner before the war was ever fought (although just as notably, before the Achilles was ever torn). Dolan, who had to go on said radio show because he lost his cool and banned someone for a silly, meaningless insult. Dolan, who continued a ridiculous feud with one of the two local tabloids in a war he most certainly tried to fight but failed to realize he could never win.
The qualities he displayed in all of those instances – pettiness, small-mindedness, being thin-skinned – all of them might have been at play when he demanded those medical records, and even though it ended up not mattering, well...it still matters. It's a sign that he is there, lurking, potentially ready to leap at the wrong time (even if, in this instance, the idea of an owner demanding to make sure a $160 million investment is fully healed from a devastating, career threatening injury, isn't all that nuts). But as is often the case with him, even if things add up in the aggregate, the optics of the whole are terrible.
Many members of the media have already and will continue to latch onto those optics today, in part because Dolan pushed the narrative when he said what he said about this summer. The fact that said narrative – “big names were coming to the Knicks” – was entirely created and pushed by the very media that today is lambasting Dolan will be lost. Durant’s injury, and the subsequent complications it caused, will be lost. The fact that there was no humanly possible way the Knicks could have known Durant would tear his Achilles when they traded KP for cap space (among other assets) will be lost.
It will all be lost because Dolan makes himself the easiest target in professional sports, in part because of his very real deficiencies as a human being (pettiness being the most prominent one) but also in part because the ones most affected by those deficiencies are the same ones crafting the narrative. It doesn't mean he's not blameless. Far from it. Another owner would almost certainly lead to an easier existence as a Knicks fan, and there are days where he absolutely deserves to be taken to task.
I'm just not sure today is one of them, nor is it clear that Sunday's events are an indictment on anything more than the Knicks making a seemingly wise bet and losing. It happens. It's worse for us because it has happened so much of the last 20 years. It also doesn't mean things aren't on the right track for once, Dolan be damned.
In the end, of course we’re left with the same question as always: will this team ever see success under Dolan’s reign?
We can hope and guess that his lesser qualities have no effect on how players perceive the organization, but again, can anyone be sure? Is success possible here despite what happened yesterday? I still continue to believe, in my admitted naïveté, that it is.
What I do know is that for the betterment of all, the foolishness needs to stop. No more press beefs. No more kicking out fans. No more radio interviews. No more anything. If he wants to retain this team, the only way we can be sure it will have no negative effects on the product is if all evidence of his fingerprints is wiped clean. Butting out of basketball decisions is a start (and we can debate whether yesterday ran counter to that notion). It’s not far enough.
As Knicks fans, we sit now with the hope that despite these uncertainties, things have turned around. On a day of lavish spending, the team was mostly frugal. They have a young, interesting core, and at this rate, should be able to toe the line next season between “dumpster fire” and “just bad enough to be in the running for a top pick.” That’s the proper balance to achieve, especially with two years left until the next summer of any consequence (barring Kawhi Leonard not signing a 1 + 1).
Again, remove the optics and the noise and ask: if any other team acted as the Knicks did yesterday, and were sitting in the spot they’re in right now, what story would be written? Maybe that story can’t be written because the owner will never allow it to. The guess is that in time, we will find out.
And until then we are left to do the same dance. To hope that the youth movement works. To hope someone emerges as a franchise cornerstone…and continues to want to bear that weight for this team; to again say that this city – the real city - is a selling point, and that the burden of wearing this jersey is a gift and not a curse; and to hope that maybe Giannis, or AD, or Kawhi, or whoever will be the one to look upon the city with the love we’ve sought since we traded away Patrick Ewing (and, truth be told, Carmelo Anthony, who, for whatever faults he had, at least wanted the bright lights and everything that came with them).
But hope is all we have. Nothing in life is ever certain, but it would be nice to have a bit more certainty for once. We thought it might arrive yesterday. It did not.
It doesn’t mean the dream can’t still come true. It can. As we keep being told, no skipping steps.
How they've started free agency was a step. It's not the one they wanted to take but it’s the best one they felt they could.
Now we'll see if it gets them any closer to the finish line.
Thanks for reading, talk to you tomorrow!