Steve Mills Discusses Kristaps Porzingis Trade

The Knicks made the decision to trade Kristaps Porzingis last week, ending a three-and-a-half year run that featured a number of highs and lows. Porzingis, the team’s 2015 lottery pick, began to express his displeasure with the team and its losing ways, culminating in a meeting involving him, his agent, and Knicks management last Thursday.

“We started to get a feel that everything wasn’t going as well as we would’ve liked with Kristaps,” Knicks president Steve Mills said in an interview on MSG. “So Scott [Perry] and I spent a lot of time saying, ‘Okay. We need to be prepared if things aren’t going well or if he doesn’t want to be here, or that we need to be ready.'” 

Mills then revealed he held exploratory trade conversations with several different teams to test Porzingis’ value, sifting through the best offers before zeroing in on a package from the Mavericks.

“We at the end of the day had about eight potential scenarios we thought would be great for us if we made the decision that we were going to trade Kristaps,” Mills said.

It was then in the meeting, which was held just hours before the trade, that Porzingis officially made his trade request alongside his brother and agent Janis Porzingis.

For the Knicks, reaching a trade agreement before the February 7 trade deadline was paramount. Porzingis was set to become a restricted free agent at season’s end, and made his intentions known that he would sign elsewhere if the team didn’t honor his request.

“We felt the 7th was really important because if we let this go beyond the 7th, the leverage completely shifted. We would not have control of the situation,” Mills said, as relayed by Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic. “We weren’t sure what Kristaps was going to come in and tell us. We didn’t know if he’d come in and tell us he wanted to be traded or he may have come in and said he wanted to do a one-year contract with the player option, which would then have made him untradeable and he would have had all the leverage. We just felt we needed to have some certainty by the 7th.

“When they came in to meet with us, they made it clear to us — it was a meeting that they requested — they made it clear to us that he did not want to play for the Knicks, that he was not going to re-sign with us as a free agent. And we in one way thanked him for the clarity because it gave us the information we needed to know.”

The Knicks would acquire Dennis Smith Jr., DeAndre Jordan, Wesley Matthews and two future first-round picks for offloading Porzingis, Tim Hardaway Jr., Courtney Lee and Trey Burke, ending the run for Porzingis in New York and placing a focus on free agency by creating two maximum-salary roster spots.

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