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.
Still a better deal than either Jimmy Butler deals or the Cousins deal, and they weren’t hurt at the time.
**** the media. As a Knicks fan, Love the deal.
Any teams offered $40M expirings, two 1sts (one unprotected!!) and athletic top 10 draft pick to send?
The longer Knicks waited, the more disgruntled and trade-value, KP would’ve lost. He didn’t even want be here. (?) Love the Knicks acted quickly and decisively – soon as he let them know; Dumped 30M+ in 2019 combined salaries ~50M through 2 years and got back two first round picks, unprotected as early as 2021.
Great deal! Especially after they sign KD and Kyrie.
And draft a top pick!
You do realize the Knicks aren’t the only team in the NBA, right? And also that they are by far the worst organization in the sport whose only selling points are NYC and maybe getting two stars/above-average-but-overpaid players to be able to play together?
First off, I’d say there’s a pretty high chance at least one of those guys doesn’t sign with the team, most likely KD, as well as a very real chance they miss out on all the big studs and have to settle for the likes of Tobias Harris. Good player, but getting two good players would be a bust in the context of this deal.
On top of that, the picks they ultimately get are likely to be late, and most teams in the league have soured on DSJ already for a reason. Yeah, there’s still some potential there, but things don’t look great right now.
And to put the final cherry on top, there’s a decent chance KP would’ve signed a qualifying offer rather than risk the Knicks matching in RFA, something he could’ve been afraid of if he indeed hated the organization as much as portrayed. In such a scenario, the Knicks would regain leverage and potentially be able to attract a better return beyond a salary dump.
This doesn’t even include the fact that I’m not buying the demonization of KP. He could’ve just been frustrated with losing, and who wouldn’t be? If so, there would’ve been one easy way to fix that: actually surrounding him with talent. With KP, a max/near-max guy and Zion, are you telling me KP wouldn’t be at least a little bit happier?
So no, not a great deal just yet. Maybe it turns out to be a good one, or at least a fair one, but right now it has a long way to go.
You’d think Porzingas was LeBron. Big freakin crybaby. Stay woke KP.
Exactly. Comes across as a total idiot in all of this.
You’re taking Mills’ word. KP has not verified this, but he’s better off in Dallas with Dirk and Cuban and Carlisle and he knows it and probably approved it, so he could be doing a favor with silence in exchange. Mills was trading for pieces to exchange, so it could have been any team.
I am referring to a flip of the package to try for ADavis, or, whoever else might attract Irving and get the ball rolling.
Anyway the article did not reference any direct quote form KP or brother.
Don’t understand the KP hate, he could have just left for nothing. He didn’t choose to get drafted by the knicks
He could have said yes to the AD trade too.
He doesn’t have a no trade clause
He couldn’t leave. Knicks have the right to match any offer as he’s restricted. If he signed the qualifying offer, he’d still be with them for a year
At this point he looks a lot more like Darko than Dirk.
What? Dude averaged 22 ppg and made the all star game last year. Darko couldn’t even come close to that in his dreams
Dude has a torn ACL.
A different story from each of the three stooges, none of which address the real question. The RFA rules and timeline nix any credibility here. We’ll learn the truth after they’re all fired.
Does that mean someone will report your preferred conspiracy theory some day?
The truth is he had an attitude problem and wasn’t up to being the man in NY. They tried to trade him but he wouldn’t agree to play for anyone except the mavs so they took what they could get and fortunately Cuban was willing to give up salary cap relief that was effectively the same as getting a star player back even though some people can’t get past a trade scoring system of some sort that seems to ignore the team they would have had vs the team they do or will have.
Conspiracy theory? No, that would require a belief that there was conspiracy. I’ll go slow (since it’s apparently needed): The stories volunteered by the team president, GM and HC are inconsistent with each other. So, maybe the opposite of a conspiracy, or just talking out of their butts, a concept you might be familiar with. Otherwise, your drivel conveys nothing of substance, just your complete ignorance of the RFA and trade rules, the salary cap and generally accepted methods for valuing cap space.
Can’t see the hate for KP6, he is sooo good & don’t nothing wrong here. Fans should stop hating, or even better hate on your team that is the right & obligation of every fan, while you keep defending your team they will keep been the joke of the league & that is not KP6’s fault. He is the best player the Knicks had in the last 40 years, apart of Ewing. Probably many years or decades to have another one that good. Keep on hating all you want.
He thinks he’s a lot better than he actually is.
These Knick fans are delusional man.
I’d be pretty upset too if I had already spent several years of my life playing for one of the worst franchises in all of sports, and in particular, a franchise that hs only won 10 games all season. Like, what did people want from KP? For him to pretend he’s happy in a crappy situation? It’s not even like he did anything to publically show up his teammates or the organization, at least not to my knowledge.
And I can guarantee that if you were to put any of the haters in his shoes, they’d have been whining from day one.
Lets be honest no one wants to play for the Knicks
Knicks fans have been sold on hope for years, now they have a king sized helping of it. I will say this, if KD comes with any other top 10 FA they dont need much else to go right, surely some of their future firsts will be at least OK. It’s the Knicks though so that cap space is probably earmarked for Boogie and Tobias Harris and their great fanbase (minus some of the idiots on here) deserve better than that.
Apparently, some of you fail to understand that the Knicks as an organization have an incentive to trash Porzingis through the media. And even though Perry can’t be blamed for the current mess that is the Knicks roster, the organization sure as heck should not get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to situations like this given how poorly it has been run over the last few decades.
More importantly, so much about this story smells fishy:
-It’s pretty rare that a player as big as KP goes from being disgruntled to requesting a meeting to being traded in such a short span of time.
-Perry says it was critical for the Knicks to make a move before the deadline to maintain leverage. Okay. But then he goes on to say that KP was the one to request the meeting. Wait a minute. So what would’ve happened if KP hadn’t been the one to request the meeting? And why did he even have to be the one to request it? If the team was so concerned he wanted to leave, and concerned enough to hunt down potential offers for him, why didn’t they just ask him point blank before going through all that trouble?
-As it is, it’s rare a team would go through the trouble of getting 8 separate offers on the table in case of the worst happening. That goes way beyond being prepared.
-Being dissatisfied with a losing and dysfunctional organization and demanding a trade are two very different things. If it was just about the losing, the team could’ve easily brought in a big fish during FA and KP goes back to being happy. And as we all know, KP is quite fond of NYC.