New York Knicks did nothing wrong in free agency - but that does not mean it went well for them
Wednesday 3 July 2019 19:50, UK
The New York Knicks did not do anything wrong this free agency period, necessarily. But, as Sky Sports NBA analyst Mark Deeks writes, that does not mean it went well for them. How can they build themselves back up?
The New York Knicks have been doing things differently in recent seasons.
The team that refused to ever tank has been picking at the top of the NBA Draft for a while now. They have also been drafting internationally. Of their last three top 10 picks prior to this season, two - Kristaps Porzingis and Frank Ntilikina - had never played on the American shores before.
One of those two, Porzingis, subsequently lived up to the draft billing, and indeed far surpassed it before suffering his serious ACL injury that ruled him out for the entirety of last season and half of the previous one.
But all this led the Knicks to do was to do something else very alien to their usual modus operandi - they knowingly traded away the best player in a deal when they moved Porzingis on January 31, along with the big unwanted contracts of Courtney Lee and Tim Hardaway Jr, to the Dallas Mavericks in exchange for Dennis Smith Jr, two future first-round picks and two pieces of contract filler.
Considering they moved by far the best talent in the deal for a couple of draft assets and one young player that they must have known would never be as good of a player as Porzingis already is (or was), the Knicks must have had a motivation for doing the deal beyond the uncertainty of Porzingis, given his injury and his free agency this summer.
The thinking, therefore, followed that they made this trade with a strong belief that they would be able to acquire some star free agents this summer. They were said to be targeting the pair of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving.
Durant and Irving did indeed pair up and did indeed come to New York. But not to the Knicks - both instead signed with the Brooklyn Nets franchise that had built itself up from the very bottom over the last few years.
With Klay Thompson re-signing with Golden State, D'Angelo Russell joining him there, Kemba Walker opting to join the Boston Celtics and Kawhi Leonard seemingly having no interest in them, all the other stars were quickly off the pile too.
And so the Knicks, a team already very much down on talent even when they had a healthy Porzingis, had just moved their best player in exchange for a bunch of cap space they could not sign any star players with, and with which they had no trade assets to construct deals for other incumbents stars.
They were thus forced to turn to Plan B without it being obvious what Plan B could even be. However, we now know. While none of them are stars, the Knicks have reportedly committed to signing six players already.
The six - Julius Randle, Bobby Portis, Reggie Bullock, Taj Gibson, Elfrid Payton and Wayne Ellington - are all various grades of good NBA player. There are no egregious overpays to be found, if indeed there are any overpayments at all.
The highest-paid will be Randle at an approximate cost of $21m per year, he's very productive and still very young. With the third year of his contract being a team option, the Knicks have the ability to be free from it within two years should it go on to be an overpay. Yet given Randle's body of work over the last couple of seasons, it probably will not be. He's good.
Portis is a bit of a shot-happy player, but one who scores a lot with excellent volume. The three-point stroke has developed over the course of his NBA career, and although it is not an efficient part of his game, he still takes players down into the post, looking to take some face-up jumpers over them from there.
Portis goes to the offensive glass as well as the defensive glass, runs the court well for a de facto center, is always active around the play, cuts to the basket and wants to be involved. He is most effective using his ball-handling and shooting as a mismatch at the five spot, and although his defensive limitations are significant and his effort not consistently there, Portis will combine with Mitchell Robinson to make for a tandem that between them can do everything.
Ellington and Bullock are shooters, and even though they are marginal players in any area outside of that, they are among the game's two very best in that regard. The third worst outside shooting team in the league last season (with the outright worst offensive rating and effective field goal percentage in the league) should get a boost from that alone.
Adding off-ball players like those two to the potential scoring forward combo of No 3 Draft pick RJ Barrett and Kevin Knox will allow the young backcourt and wing players of note to get time as primary ball handlers, while having weapons alongside them to bailout possession should they get stuck.
Meanwhile, Gibson is the very savvy and unselfish veteran who still defends better than those 10 years younger than him, a player who can help to turn the absolutely excellent Robinson into someone even better than he already is.
All of these players are pretty good, all of the prices of fair, and while they did not get an infusion of star talent, the Knicks did at least get a talent increase for the loss of no significant rotation players.
However, while it can never be that bad, signing good players to good contracts does not in itself make a good team.
Various factors come together to negate the trade value of these pieces, even if they are packaged together. The new signees cannot be traded for three months after being signed; partially guaranteed contracts no longer have positive trade value in the year of the partial guarantee; the deals only being two years long means not a lot of team control should anybody vastly outstrip their contract; and of course, you cannot merely substitute quality for quantity.
This is essentially what the Knicks have had to do. Their new-look line-up is one with some depth, but very little at the top end in terms of star power or potential.
It is also a line-up that figures to struggle badly at the defensive end; Robinson is the ultimate eraser on the inside, and Gibson still has his savvy even if he is starting to lose his speed, but no one else apart from Ntilikina has proven themselves to be an above-average NBA defender. Several are far below it, and Ntilikina has been so unimpactful offensive that it looks unlikely he will ever be an NBA starter.
The Knicks did not do anything wrong this free agency period, necessarily. But that does not mean it went well. They will still be down near the bottom of the NBA. The question, then, becomes how can they build themselves back up internally?
Perhaps a look to the very same Brooklyn Nets team that beat them out for the signatures of Durant and Irving could reveal some answers.
At the time of Sean Marks' appointment as general manager, the Nets had absolutely no assets in the chamber, far fewer than New York have right now. Yet in three years they were able to build a team competitive not only on the free agent market but also in the Eastern Conference by taking on salary dumps with assets attached, having success with 'redraft' players, and extracting the best value from what they already had.
In having a cupboard almost completely bare, the Nets could in a sense afford to be picky; they had no obligation or urgency to consider players who did not fit with what they were trying to build, and thus they were able to build something suitably enticing to land two of the game's greats despite hot competition for many other places.
The Knicks conversely do have something of a foundation. Robinson has just put in a phenomenal rookie season, and although they are flawed as prospects, both Knox and Barrett have some high-level scoring potential. There are no bad contracts on the books except for the immovable residual money still owed to Joakim Noah, they have full control of all their first-round draft picks, they have two extra ones still to come from the Mavericks, and they do not need to have to fight to get attention. The eyes, as ever, will be on New York, no matter how much they struggle.
To overload a roster with young players and expect optimum internal growth is naive, and something that the Knicks have avoided by signing these veterans with the cap space that would otherwise be more of a burden than an asset. The Nets did something similar with the acquisitions of Jared Dudley and Ed Davis this season, as well as DeMarre Carroll in the past, and as a result, they grew at least one All-Star in Russell.
It all only works, though, if the identified core talents are good enough. The Knicks' core prospects all have some serious limitations and questions still to answer. The front office will be hoping that the veterans and young veterans they have signed this summer will be able to ease those concerns, develop the right culture over the next two seasons and help the youth to grow as both individuals and as a unit.
The Knicks can then re-enter the free agency market in two years' time, a year in which they will have two first-round draft picks in a potentially stacked pool of prospects, hoping to be the biggest fish in a small pond. At that point, it is figured, they cannot strike out again.
It is better than nothing. It is a plan. There is upside to it.
But a two-year abridgement is not what Porzingis was traded for.
