Over the course of the last several seasons, it became abundantly clear that the Knicks’ worst enemy was on their own payroll. After a needlessly dramatic 2016/17 campaign, the club appeared destined to wallow in yet another campaign of cringe-worthy in-fighting and fascinating mismanagement.
In the weeks and months after Jackson was replaced by former team general manager Steve Mills, with Scott Perry coming aboard to step in as the new GM, the Knicks have regained some semblance of normalcy and it already appears as though the club is trending in a positive direction.
The Knicks may still be a long way from actually competing, even in the East, but they’ve amassed a semi-intriguing pile of assets. Sure, some of the club’s new core is raw and imperfect, and the roster that broke camp last week probably won’t be the one that ends New York’s playoff drought. But the current roster does feature several valued building blocks that the team’s revamped front office can actually work with heading forward.
The fact that the Knicks’ core players will no longer be alienated by their own employer is simply a bonus.
Key offseason losses:
It’s a reflection of just how badly the franchise needed to part ways with Jackson that his ouster was the story of the Knicks’ summer, detailed above. In any other year, the trade which sent Carmelo Anthony to the Thunder would have been the most important event of the team’s offseason.
Anthony’s tenure in the Big Apple, however, will be forever linked to Jackson’s. The Knicks will miss Anthony’s production — he made the All-Star Game in each of his seven seasons with the franchise. Still, the truth is, the last thing a team in the Knicks’ position needs is an uninspired, aging star looming large enough to interfere with a genuine rebuild, yet not single-handedly capable of powering – or even supplementing – a winner.
The Knicks made a splash last summer acquiring Derrick Rose from the Bulls, but the league’s saddest “super-team” didn’t see the results it wanted in 2016/17. For all the flak Rose gets for being fragile, he actually pieced together a reasonably solid season, averaging 18.0 points and 4.4 assists per game in 64 contests. That said, the veteran had no long-term role on a team that has since committed to a rebuild.
The loss of Justin Holiday to the Bulls via free agency won’t devastate the Knicks, but the unheralded 28-year-old emerged as a quality teammate and leader, and would have been a nice influence on the young players in New York’s locker room.
Key offseason additions:
The Knicks didn’t get a massive haul in return for Anthony, for reasons implied above. They did, however, get an undervalued building block in 25-year-old Enes Kanter. Kanter, the third overall pick in the 2011 draft, has been impressively productive on the offensive end of the court over the course of his six-year career. He’ll need to improve defensively in order to be relied upon as a full-time center on a winning basketball team, but he’ll see his biggest stage, for better or worse, in New York.
The Knicks offered restricted free agent Tim Hardaway Jr. an inexplicably lucrative contract this summer, one the Hawks had no desire to match. It’s a deal that they very well may end up regretting, considering the 25-year-old has never averaged more than 15 points per game. Even handpicked as the team’s primary perimeter threat, it’s hard to imagine Hardaway Jr. ever making enough of a game impact to justify the $70MM+ he’ll collect between now and 2021.
While he may be more of a reclamation project than anything at this stage in his career, the Knicks will be happy to take a flyer on Doug McDermott, whose contract helped facilitate the Anthony trade.
Michael Beasley, signed to a one-year, minimum-salary deal, could be a value add for the Knicks. Beasley has filled the stat sheet for similarly moribund franchises over the course of his career but, more impressively, has slotted into the rotation of two legitimate playoff teams since 2016. Only time will tell whether he can carve out a niche as a reliable, if eccentric, veteran or if he’s little more than an empty fantasy asset.
Finally, while it’s hard to pinpoint just what Frank Ntilikina‘s NBA future will look like, he’s a tantalizing, raw point guard with all the physical tools to thrive in the league. Are the Knicks now a stable enough franchise to shape such a malleable talent? That remains to be seen.
Outlook for 2017/18:
The Knicks’ roster may look somewhat disjointed and lackluster, but the biggest thing going for the franchise is a fresh start. New York has a franchise player to build around in Kristaps Porzingis, who, at 22 years old, is young enough to develop alongside any long-term projects the club brings aboard, with Ntilikina and Willy Hernangomez chief among them.
The Knicks won’t make headlines for their ability to win now — the veteran signings of Hardaway, Beasley, and Ramon Sessions leave much to be desired. Nonetheless, they could teeter on the threshold of fielding a reasonably competent team in a metropolitan market that necessitates one, while also laying the groundwork for a more ambitious long-term rebuild.
Salary information from Basketball Insiders used in the creation of this post. Photos courtesy of USA Today Sports Images. Luke Adams contributed to this post.
