Let’s not forget that Leon put together a first rate management team. I am not sure what World Wide Wes has contributed but we know about Brock Aller’s wizardry. And a lot of the team DNA was inherited from Thibs, including the game’s never over ethos. Including making comebacks in the playoffs from 20 point deficits three times last year (and another 7 times in the regular season) on the positive side and playing their starters with 20 point leads and a few minutes left in the game on the negative side.
The only two things that I associate with him are pushing to draft IQ and pushing for Cam Reddish and being upset that he did not get playing time. But I certainly don’t know if either is true or if he has done lots behind the scene. Possibly, Jon has a more informed view.
It has continued to surprise me that Leon Rose has received just about zero votes for executive of the year since he has been in place as the Knicks President (and essentially GM). As the Knicks were growing and winning, you would have thought that he would have come in at least 2nd or 3rd or even 4th, let alone win the award.
Now comes possibly the harder part. Building a championship team is wildly difficult without lottery success (still pisses me off the San Antonio has won three lotteries when hall of fame centers were coming out) but maintaining the championship culture is just as hard, if not harder.
Tuesday and Wednesday will be fascinating and incredibly important. Besides finding a way to keep Mitch, Jose, Mo and Shamet, the Knicks have three picks. A first, an extremely valuable second (first in round two/ first pick to lead off Wednesday) and a low level 2nd round pick. These all represent cheap roaster fillers, potential rotation guys and/or future picks if Leon plays his hand right.
The cherry on top of the sundae was somehow getting Yabusele to renounce his player option. (Why did he do that? Maybe could make more overseas.) Somehow getting the Bulls to take him for Dalen Terry. And further somehow getting the Pelicans to take Dalen Terry and two twos for Alvarado. Remarkable. Forget Brunson Brock Aller deserves a statue.
I think someone could do a Knicks version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" using nothing but the last 25 years of front-office chaos. Patrick for Glen Rice. Scott Layden. Isaiah the skirt-chaser. Larry Brown. Jerome James. The 18 games of Antonio McDyess. Eddy Curry. Joakim Noah. Morose Phil Jackson taking Frank Nilikina over Donovan Mitchell.
Then all the near-misses: Kyle Lowry. Kyrie Irving. Kevin Durant.
And somehow, after all that, here we are.
This is a wonderful tick-tock, Jonathan, and a reminder that even New York fans can be patient when there is a plan worth believing in.
(I can't help but hope we'll be saying the same thing about David Stearns and the Mets in a few years. "Ohhh... that's why we got Jorge Polanco. I get it now.")
It's been nine days and I'm still replaying videos. Still watching fourth quarters. My social feeds are basically one endless stream of Knicks content. Every now and then I stumble across a reaction video from some fan in Iowa or Portugal and wind up watching that too.
And I'll leave you with this thought: What if the Captain spends the summer obsessing over defense? Not becoming Jrue Holiday. Not making an All-Defensive Team. Just moving from a C-minus defender to a B-plus on-ball defender.
Is that asking too much? Because if the answer is no, the rest of the league may have an even bigger problem than they thought.
To build on this a bit, I’d love to see a column about all the misses and how they would have affected this season. Mitchell over Brunson, Jaden Ivey (yuck), and how about all the coaches they wanted before Woodson? Do any of those coaches lead them to the Championship?
This is one of my favorite parts of this entire success. After 20 years of watching Knicks’ front offices try and fail to build a good team, I came to some conclusions:
First round draft picks are valued higher, on average, than the players picked by them.
Lottery picks expect to play and expect to dominate and can be difficult to meld into a team concept.
High usage, high scoring stars get all the credit for winning and none if the blame for losing, but teams that win have smart players that can play defense and rebound and pass. As a result, there are underrated players all over the league. Guys that were lottery picks tend to be overvalued over actual performance and guys that were 2nd round picks tend to be undervalued vs actual performance.
Salary cap management is the key to team building. Extending players for sentimental reasons can kill a team’s chances.
I feel like Leon saw this too, and his actions proved it. As a draft junkie, at first I hated him trading down. But he used other teams’ overvaluation of draft picks to gain assets while picking up underrated players later in the draft.
When Randle bottomed out in 21-22, he chose to keep him and rehabilitate his value rather than trade him for nothing and promote Obi Toppin, a very good player who was flawed on defense.
He didn’t give up all his assets for Donovan Mitchell and was willing to walk away. He correctly identified Brunson as a rare high usage scorer that was underrated and again used teams’ overvaluation of draft picks to clear his Fournier/Kemba mistakes and get Brunson.
He let Toppin go for almost nothing, so he could sign Donte, whose fire and winning attitude made him underrated.
Hartenstein. Criminally underrated.
He didn’t extend fan favorite Quickley and instead traded him, managing to include the overvalued RJ Barrett (lottery pick) in exchange for OG Anunoby. At first I hated the trade, but I didn’t understand what type of player OG was. Leon did.
Using his overvalued picks to shed salary and pick up a great role player and OG injury insurance in Mikal.
Trading for Kat was one if the biggest risks he took. But losing iHart and Mitch’s injuries caused him to take a gamble that Kat could defend the 5 well enough. Losing Donte stung but with Deuce in the mix and Mikal coming in, Donte’s role was likely to be reduced.
Getting Alvarado. A backup point who plays pesky defense? Underrated.
Leon saw what I saw and more - he basically collected undervalued players and shed overvalued ones. He put together such a high basketball iq team that they were smarter than Thibs. Thibs, overvalued for this team. Brown, undervalued.
Other teams, if they are smart, will study and learn from this. This is how you do it.
Well said but Thibs had no deep bench to play so he was never overvalued for this team. He never had THIS team. We'll never know what he would have done with them, but credit to Mike Brown who eventually, very painfully, figured it out. He also tried a lot of things that failed and made a ton of mistakes. Turning failure into success seems to be their greatest skill. Just kept finding a way to win. Rose, Brown, and the whole staff. What a learning process they all went through. Just kept learning and adapting..
Great article. Kudos to Leon . Brown fooled many of us before bowing deeply to him and giving credit but I think it's unfair that Tibbs was given no credit except from the aficionados . Showalter redux.How about a shout out to Kat from this weekend for saying he'd restructure to keep the gang together. He went from Whiny bitch to full man child champion in one month . Became so special. Tnx Kat.
Draft will be fascinating for blue and orange. Can't wait.Still basking and ordering. Tnx for discount Jon.
One of my favorite stats is that since 2024, when teams are down by 14 or more in the second half of a playoff game, the Knicks are 8-6 and the rest of the NBA is 10-110.
Shout out also to Brock Aller and his obsession with getting teams the Knicks trade with to randomly throw in draft rights to international guys taken like 10 years ago.
The most impressive part to me is that everything they ever did was trading UP in value, they had plenty of chances to turn bigger contracts (Randle, Fournier, Bojan's team option etc.) into 2 or 3 lesser players/cap hits just to clean up the salary sheet, but they always waited until the time was right to actually get a productive player out of it.
The KAT trade specifically was a work of art and should go down as one of the greatest in Knicks history, the balls necessary to sell high on a fan favorite on Donte and also give away a player who at the time wasn't viewed as much worse than KAT in Julius. Not to mention that KAT himself was getting traded by his own team because he was seen as overpaid and unreliable. Most of us were probably content in figuring out the center situation later even if it meant punting away half or an entire season. If they didn't get aggressive there we probably never end up winning a title. It even set us up further for a potential Giannis trade that we luckily never had to make, Perfect brick by brick building.
EDIT a day later: Case in point, they never did what Minnesota just did lol
So many were pretty much done with KAT before the Giannis trade rumors started. He was so inconsistent. Many hoped to ship him out asap. I have to believe it played with his head as well because he became a different player once he dodged that trade bullet for another year. He wanted to be here. I also remember people laughing at us winning the Cup over SA, saying it meant nothing. It meant just enough to get the team to believe they could do anything, including KAT. As JB has said often the team really believed in itself. I hope the Ben Stiller film is consulting with KFS to make sure these lessons are conveyed into the story of the Knicks. The Hard Way was the only way for us.
Jon, this is a great chronological history of Leon Rose's tenure as GM. I admit, reading some of those draft night moves he made brought back the feeling of the acid stomach I had on that draft night! lol The irony is, that as recently as April 23rd, all of us were not very happy with Leon's moves, were looking for multiple off season trades & were lamenting the fact that we had hired one season Brown! Yet, 2 months later, we don't even remember (or we try to forget!) all the negativity that spewed from the top of KFS (Jon-lol) to most of it's subscribers ( I was a very frequent contributor.) To be fair, I think that was a built-in mechanism, fostered over 53 years of frustration. In those next 2 months, the puzzle pieces (that up until that point were square peg in round hole) miraculously came together in Game #4 vs the Hawks & we rode a magic carpet ride to the NBA Championship. Kudos to Leon for staying the course & believing in what he had done!
Now, will he trade the #24th pick because of cap space? Or will he keep it & give us a hint about who might not be back on next year's roster? He also has the first pick in the second round, a very coveted pick after night #1. I think that gets moved & the last pick is a Euro stored pick. Next season has started & I'm still waiting for most of my memorabilia to be delivered! lol (KFS OG/Breen shirt was delivered!)
Nice tip of the cap to Leon. Many quickly forget what a disaster he inherited and then so masterfully locked into a “continuous soup” approach that not only led them to the promised land but made them a far more fun team to watch through the process. Add to it that we’ve all understandably gotten swept up in the magic of a 53 year drought ending, but this team is built to win again. They just figured out the recipe in the first round. Imagine playing a full season with this focus and determination! Yes, likely losing Mitch and likely Shamet will hurt, but our nucleus is intact.
Good article! Leon has assembled a great team! Let's hope other organizations don't start offering big dollars to members of our management core, like Brock, to lure them away in the hope that they can replicate the front office magic that was used to build our team! We need to keep both cores together! #InLeonWeTrust
What a great film it would be to clearly chart the ups and downs of the season from the insider and intelligent fan's perspective. Could be one of the greatest sports stories ever told. I watched American Underdog again recently about Kurt Warner that was about him overcoming so many odds stacked against him personally. Our film would be about how the whole franchise overcame the odds. I'm not sure that kind of film has ever been done in any major sport. Can anyone think of any? The Warner movie had a scene when Coach Dick Vermeil decided to finally bet on Warner, undrafted, and out of the league for years in the Arena Football League, then leading them to the championship. But clearly there were many aspects of how the Rams put that team together that have never been clearly told. Even the hiring of Vermeil himself, out of coaching for fifteen years in the broadcast booth, was such a long shot. The movie Invincible about his earlier years with the Eagles and Vince Papale's rise, also touches on what it takes for an underdog to win at that level. Maybe something like Moneyball but the New York basketball version.
Hey Jon. If I remember correctly. Five years ago you had Frazier, Ewing, and Reed in that order for your top 75 Knicks. For years after reading Shoot the Lights Out (a book about the Knicks first championship season) in the late 90s. I always agreed with that top three. With Fraziers impressive game seven in the 1970 Finals and Ewings incredible career numbers overshadowing Reeds well earned two Finals MVP.
I asked you pre Finals if a Wade 2006 Finals type performance be enough for JB to leapfrog two or more in the top three. Games four and five pretty much clinched it for me. Overall, his whole Finals was impressive. Even when he didnt have the best efficiency in first two games. He still had important clutch moments that lead to wins. His playoff scoring average of 28.4 ppg is incredible in itself. For me I think its now Frazier, JB, Ewing, and Reed. What say you Jon? Unless of course a week isnt enough to get a good sense yet lol. Understandable lol.
I will be writing a series for this newsletter re-stacking every Knick on the roster among the top 75 ever. Honestly, I'm not even sure which way I'm leaning with JB. There's a case for 1. There's a case for 4. IDK. I don't even know that I agree with my own ranking from 5 years ago.
One's a winner who subjugated his game for his team to win a championship & the other was a guy who was all about himself, made sure they got rid of the most exciting player in his Knicks era & was more concerned about his stats, not the team's! Seems like a no brainer!
Let’s not forget that Leon put together a first rate management team. I am not sure what World Wide Wes has contributed but we know about Brock Aller’s wizardry. And a lot of the team DNA was inherited from Thibs, including the game’s never over ethos. Including making comebacks in the playoffs from 20 point deficits three times last year (and another 7 times in the regular season) on the positive side and playing their starters with 20 point leads and a few minutes left in the game on the negative side.
if you're interested in reading more about Wes' impact, Henry Abbot wrote a great piece about it here: https://www.truehoop.com/p/the-knicks-were-built-different
Thanks
A book about Knicks' management and a biography of Jalen Brunson. Worth any price.
I’m sure Wes has done a ton even if he’s not gotten media attention for it
The only two things that I associate with him are pushing to draft IQ and pushing for Cam Reddish and being upset that he did not get playing time. But I certainly don’t know if either is true or if he has done lots behind the scene. Possibly, Jon has a more informed view.
It has continued to surprise me that Leon Rose has received just about zero votes for executive of the year since he has been in place as the Knicks President (and essentially GM). As the Knicks were growing and winning, you would have thought that he would have come in at least 2nd or 3rd or even 4th, let alone win the award.
Now comes possibly the harder part. Building a championship team is wildly difficult without lottery success (still pisses me off the San Antonio has won three lotteries when hall of fame centers were coming out) but maintaining the championship culture is just as hard, if not harder.
Tuesday and Wednesday will be fascinating and incredibly important. Besides finding a way to keep Mitch, Jose, Mo and Shamet, the Knicks have three picks. A first, an extremely valuable second (first in round two/ first pick to lead off Wednesday) and a low level 2nd round pick. These all represent cheap roaster fillers, potential rotation guys and/or future picks if Leon plays his hand right.
The cherry on top of the sundae was somehow getting Yabusele to renounce his player option. (Why did he do that? Maybe could make more overseas.) Somehow getting the Bulls to take him for Dalen Terry. And further somehow getting the Pelicans to take Dalen Terry and two twos for Alvarado. Remarkable. Forget Brunson Brock Aller deserves a statue.
I think someone could do a Knicks version of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" using nothing but the last 25 years of front-office chaos. Patrick for Glen Rice. Scott Layden. Isaiah the skirt-chaser. Larry Brown. Jerome James. The 18 games of Antonio McDyess. Eddy Curry. Joakim Noah. Morose Phil Jackson taking Frank Nilikina over Donovan Mitchell.
Then all the near-misses: Kyle Lowry. Kyrie Irving. Kevin Durant.
And somehow, after all that, here we are.
This is a wonderful tick-tock, Jonathan, and a reminder that even New York fans can be patient when there is a plan worth believing in.
(I can't help but hope we'll be saying the same thing about David Stearns and the Mets in a few years. "Ohhh... that's why we got Jorge Polanco. I get it now.")
It's been nine days and I'm still replaying videos. Still watching fourth quarters. My social feeds are basically one endless stream of Knicks content. Every now and then I stumble across a reaction video from some fan in Iowa or Portugal and wind up watching that too.
And I'll leave you with this thought: What if the Captain spends the summer obsessing over defense? Not becoming Jrue Holiday. Not making an All-Defensive Team. Just moving from a C-minus defender to a B-plus on-ball defender.
Is that asking too much? Because if the answer is no, the rest of the league may have an even bigger problem than they thought.
FWIW, I thought Brunson maxed out on defense this postseason. I rarely felt like his presence was untenable, and credit to him for that.
To build on this a bit, I’d love to see a column about all the misses and how they would have affected this season. Mitchell over Brunson, Jaden Ivey (yuck), and how about all the coaches they wanted before Woodson? Do any of those coaches lead them to the Championship?
This is one of my favorite parts of this entire success. After 20 years of watching Knicks’ front offices try and fail to build a good team, I came to some conclusions:
First round draft picks are valued higher, on average, than the players picked by them.
Lottery picks expect to play and expect to dominate and can be difficult to meld into a team concept.
High usage, high scoring stars get all the credit for winning and none if the blame for losing, but teams that win have smart players that can play defense and rebound and pass. As a result, there are underrated players all over the league. Guys that were lottery picks tend to be overvalued over actual performance and guys that were 2nd round picks tend to be undervalued vs actual performance.
Salary cap management is the key to team building. Extending players for sentimental reasons can kill a team’s chances.
I feel like Leon saw this too, and his actions proved it. As a draft junkie, at first I hated him trading down. But he used other teams’ overvaluation of draft picks to gain assets while picking up underrated players later in the draft.
When Randle bottomed out in 21-22, he chose to keep him and rehabilitate his value rather than trade him for nothing and promote Obi Toppin, a very good player who was flawed on defense.
He didn’t give up all his assets for Donovan Mitchell and was willing to walk away. He correctly identified Brunson as a rare high usage scorer that was underrated and again used teams’ overvaluation of draft picks to clear his Fournier/Kemba mistakes and get Brunson.
Josh Hart. Criminally underrated. Cam Reddish, lottery pick, criminally overrated.
He let Toppin go for almost nothing, so he could sign Donte, whose fire and winning attitude made him underrated.
Hartenstein. Criminally underrated.
He didn’t extend fan favorite Quickley and instead traded him, managing to include the overvalued RJ Barrett (lottery pick) in exchange for OG Anunoby. At first I hated the trade, but I didn’t understand what type of player OG was. Leon did.
Using his overvalued picks to shed salary and pick up a great role player and OG injury insurance in Mikal.
Trading for Kat was one if the biggest risks he took. But losing iHart and Mitch’s injuries caused him to take a gamble that Kat could defend the 5 well enough. Losing Donte stung but with Deuce in the mix and Mikal coming in, Donte’s role was likely to be reduced.
Getting Alvarado. A backup point who plays pesky defense? Underrated.
Leon saw what I saw and more - he basically collected undervalued players and shed overvalued ones. He put together such a high basketball iq team that they were smarter than Thibs. Thibs, overvalued for this team. Brown, undervalued.
Other teams, if they are smart, will study and learn from this. This is how you do it.
it's a great, great list. my top one: Salary cap management is the key to team building.
Well said but Thibs had no deep bench to play so he was never overvalued for this team. He never had THIS team. We'll never know what he would have done with them, but credit to Mike Brown who eventually, very painfully, figured it out. He also tried a lot of things that failed and made a ton of mistakes. Turning failure into success seems to be their greatest skill. Just kept finding a way to win. Rose, Brown, and the whole staff. What a learning process they all went through. Just kept learning and adapting..
Great article. Kudos to Leon . Brown fooled many of us before bowing deeply to him and giving credit but I think it's unfair that Tibbs was given no credit except from the aficionados . Showalter redux.How about a shout out to Kat from this weekend for saying he'd restructure to keep the gang together. He went from Whiny bitch to full man child champion in one month . Became so special. Tnx Kat.
Draft will be fascinating for blue and orange. Can't wait.Still basking and ordering. Tnx for discount Jon.
Appreciate you Mike
Despite my firm belief that he had reached his ceiling with this team I'm thrilled to give a hearty thank you to Thibs!
Thank you KAT! Had not heard that but was thinking we needed it bad.
One of my favorite stats is that since 2024, when teams are down by 14 or more in the second half of a playoff game, the Knicks are 8-6 and the rest of the NBA is 10-110.
Thank you Thibs!
Shout out also to Brock Aller and his obsession with getting teams the Knicks trade with to randomly throw in draft rights to international guys taken like 10 years ago.
The most impressive part to me is that everything they ever did was trading UP in value, they had plenty of chances to turn bigger contracts (Randle, Fournier, Bojan's team option etc.) into 2 or 3 lesser players/cap hits just to clean up the salary sheet, but they always waited until the time was right to actually get a productive player out of it.
The KAT trade specifically was a work of art and should go down as one of the greatest in Knicks history, the balls necessary to sell high on a fan favorite on Donte and also give away a player who at the time wasn't viewed as much worse than KAT in Julius. Not to mention that KAT himself was getting traded by his own team because he was seen as overpaid and unreliable. Most of us were probably content in figuring out the center situation later even if it meant punting away half or an entire season. If they didn't get aggressive there we probably never end up winning a title. It even set us up further for a potential Giannis trade that we luckily never had to make, Perfect brick by brick building.
EDIT a day later: Case in point, they never did what Minnesota just did lol
I was about to write, look at what Minny just did with Julius! And then I saw your edit lol. And TC is a great GM too. I guess Leon is just better.
So many were pretty much done with KAT before the Giannis trade rumors started. He was so inconsistent. Many hoped to ship him out asap. I have to believe it played with his head as well because he became a different player once he dodged that trade bullet for another year. He wanted to be here. I also remember people laughing at us winning the Cup over SA, saying it meant nothing. It meant just enough to get the team to believe they could do anything, including KAT. As JB has said often the team really believed in itself. I hope the Ben Stiller film is consulting with KFS to make sure these lessons are conveyed into the story of the Knicks. The Hard Way was the only way for us.
Jon, this is a great chronological history of Leon Rose's tenure as GM. I admit, reading some of those draft night moves he made brought back the feeling of the acid stomach I had on that draft night! lol The irony is, that as recently as April 23rd, all of us were not very happy with Leon's moves, were looking for multiple off season trades & were lamenting the fact that we had hired one season Brown! Yet, 2 months later, we don't even remember (or we try to forget!) all the negativity that spewed from the top of KFS (Jon-lol) to most of it's subscribers ( I was a very frequent contributor.) To be fair, I think that was a built-in mechanism, fostered over 53 years of frustration. In those next 2 months, the puzzle pieces (that up until that point were square peg in round hole) miraculously came together in Game #4 vs the Hawks & we rode a magic carpet ride to the NBA Championship. Kudos to Leon for staying the course & believing in what he had done!
Now, will he trade the #24th pick because of cap space? Or will he keep it & give us a hint about who might not be back on next year's roster? He also has the first pick in the second round, a very coveted pick after night #1. I think that gets moved & the last pick is a Euro stored pick. Next season has started & I'm still waiting for most of my memorabilia to be delivered! lol (KFS OG/Breen shirt was delivered!)
#2026NBAChampionNewYorkKnicks
I look forward to being much less negative moving forward!
I'd like to think I will be as well, but once the 2026-27 season starts, I'm not sure I'll be keeping that pledge! lol
Look forward to the new content.
Lets ask the expert Ray tomorrow lol.
Nice tip of the cap to Leon. Many quickly forget what a disaster he inherited and then so masterfully locked into a “continuous soup” approach that not only led them to the promised land but made them a far more fun team to watch through the process. Add to it that we’ve all understandably gotten swept up in the magic of a 53 year drought ending, but this team is built to win again. They just figured out the recipe in the first round. Imagine playing a full season with this focus and determination! Yes, likely losing Mitch and likely Shamet will hurt, but our nucleus is intact.
Good article! Leon has assembled a great team! Let's hope other organizations don't start offering big dollars to members of our management core, like Brock, to lure them away in the hope that they can replicate the front office magic that was used to build our team! We need to keep both cores together! #InLeonWeTrust
What a great film it would be to clearly chart the ups and downs of the season from the insider and intelligent fan's perspective. Could be one of the greatest sports stories ever told. I watched American Underdog again recently about Kurt Warner that was about him overcoming so many odds stacked against him personally. Our film would be about how the whole franchise overcame the odds. I'm not sure that kind of film has ever been done in any major sport. Can anyone think of any? The Warner movie had a scene when Coach Dick Vermeil decided to finally bet on Warner, undrafted, and out of the league for years in the Arena Football League, then leading them to the championship. But clearly there were many aspects of how the Rams put that team together that have never been clearly told. Even the hiring of Vermeil himself, out of coaching for fifteen years in the broadcast booth, was such a long shot. The movie Invincible about his earlier years with the Eagles and Vince Papale's rise, also touches on what it takes for an underdog to win at that level. Maybe something like Moneyball but the New York basketball version.
Hey Jon. If I remember correctly. Five years ago you had Frazier, Ewing, and Reed in that order for your top 75 Knicks. For years after reading Shoot the Lights Out (a book about the Knicks first championship season) in the late 90s. I always agreed with that top three. With Fraziers impressive game seven in the 1970 Finals and Ewings incredible career numbers overshadowing Reeds well earned two Finals MVP.
I asked you pre Finals if a Wade 2006 Finals type performance be enough for JB to leapfrog two or more in the top three. Games four and five pretty much clinched it for me. Overall, his whole Finals was impressive. Even when he didnt have the best efficiency in first two games. He still had important clutch moments that lead to wins. His playoff scoring average of 28.4 ppg is incredible in itself. For me I think its now Frazier, JB, Ewing, and Reed. What say you Jon? Unless of course a week isnt enough to get a good sense yet lol. Understandable lol.
I will be writing a series for this newsletter re-stacking every Knick on the roster among the top 75 ever. Honestly, I'm not even sure which way I'm leaning with JB. There's a case for 1. There's a case for 4. IDK. I don't even know that I agree with my own ranking from 5 years ago.
Just as long as Melo isn't anywhere near the top 5...or 10 on my list!
I think Melo vs KAT is now a very interesting argument. Melo is definitely in my top 10, definitely not in my top 5
One's a winner who subjugated his game for his team to win a championship & the other was a guy who was all about himself, made sure they got rid of the most exciting player in his Knicks era & was more concerned about his stats, not the team's! Seems like a no brainer!