New York Knicks Losing Shot to Rebuild Through Free Agency Alone
In some fashion, the 2014-15 New York Knicks resemble Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption if you pause the movie part of the way through: They are crawling through a river of filth, but there is no certainty about whether or not they will come out clean on the other side. Through half the schedule, the Knicks are on pace to win a pathetic 10 games.
The team's big splash in the offseason—other than new team president Phil Jackson bringing in his former player Derek Fisher to be the first-year head coach—consisted of retaining 30-year-old Carmelo Anthony for five years and more than $120 million. Apparently, the front office had not thought very far past that decision.
On a team laden with bloated contracts and fraught with players who do not complement one another, this season was already slated as an afterthought, but the plan was to at least compete for the bottom of the playoffs in a watery Eastern Conference.
Instead, the Knicks are barreling toward the worst season in team history, and that could have damning consequences in the future. Not only has the team failed to make itself an attractive destination for prospective free agents, but the top players are more likely to stay where they are anyway, and time is wasting for the team to produce some glimmer of quality to be hopeful about for 2015-16.
The Ugly
The Knicks wrapped up the first half of their season with a 95-79 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks on Jan. 15 in London—we sincerely apologize to the citizens of the United Kingdom for that matchup—dropping them to 5-36, setting a pace for the worst season in franchise history by far and making fans wonder if they'll be able to halt a mighty 16-game losing streak.
The 1962-63 Knicks still hold the mark for the worst season at 21-59, but this year's abominable incarnation of a basketball team is well on its way to an even worse campaign.
Anthony hasn't been fully healthy all season, and that has been a catalyst for the awful onslaught of losses.
The only question remaining is, when can he undergo surgery and still be on track for full health once training camp opens for next season? Moreover, the clock ticks loudly for him, as it does for all athletes beyond 30, and the Knicks' window for title contention will not stay open for more than three or four years.
And the rest of the rotation never materialized around Melo even when he was on the court.
Jose Calderon's injury to start the year left the backcourt in shambles, with lead-footed veteran Pablo Prigioni representing the exact opposite of sprightly, inexperienced youngster Shane Larkin. Even once Calderon returned, the offense could barely function, and his age showed on defense, where he lacks the quickness or athleticism to hang with virtually any point guard.
The Knicks began the year with a platoon at shooting guard composed of Iman Shumpert, Tim Hardaway Jr. and J.R. Smith, but no one distinguished himself or even carved out a clear role in the rotation.
Samuel Dalembert played so poorly that the Knicks waived him on Jan. 5 before his contract became fully guaranteed, jettisoning a player who made significant contributions on a pretty good Dallas Mavericks team a season ago but was totally ineffectual in New York.
That move saved the Knicks the princely sum of $2 million, per the New York Post's Marc Berman. It came along with a trade that sent Smith and Shumpert to the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for the flotsam and jetsam of a three-team trade, a 2019 second-round pick and a couple of trade exceptions.
That all but abandoned the season in the first week of January. Not even Amar'e Stoudemire's relatively competent play on offense (13.1 points and 7.4 rebounds per game) has made an impact on the win total, so Jackson threw the whole plan down the trash compactor and began retooling for next season.
Through 41 games, exactly half of the schedule, the Knicks rank 28th in points per 100 possessions, via NBA.com, which represents a worse offensive efficiency than the Minnesota Timberwolves, and they rank 29th in points allowed per 100 possessions for a worse defense than the L.A. Lakers.
The season has been Elephant Man levels of ugly, and the Knicks do not have an alibi.
The Bad
The dream targets for the Knicks in free agency would be a defensive stalwart and deft passer like Memphis Grizzlies center Marc Gasol or a potent scorer with size and length like Portland Trail Blazers power forward LaMarcus Aldridge. Unfortunately for the Knicks, the best free agents in the 2015 class will likely stay put.
Gasol told Ronald Tillery of the Memphis Commercial Appeal back in June: "I’ve always said Memphis is my home away from home. ... I don’t see myself anywhere else.”
However, as with any sensible business mind, Gasol plans to assess his options after the season. He told the Los Angeles Daily News' Mark Medina regarding his agent, Arn Tellem: “I haven’t weighed anything yet. We’ll sit down and have a human eye-to-eye conversation. We’ll see what we’re looking for the next four or five years of my life with this team, different teams and my family. Whatever decision I make, it would be the best.”
There exists a faint hope that the Knicks could manage to lure Gasol to NYC, but his statement to Medina is really just something free agents say to drive up their value.
As for Aldridge, he addressed his impending free agency before the Blazers beat the Knicks on Dec. 7, saying via Mitch Abramson of the New York Daily News: “I really haven’t thought about it. I’m in the moment of playing here, and my team is pretty good this year, and I’m not a one-foot-in-one-foot-out guy, so I’m just focused on the task at hand and trying to win games right now.”
The crux of Aldridge's point applies to all the top free agents: He already plays on a very good team, so why would he want to go and join the Knicks, who are presently struggling through their worst season ever?
This same logic would apply to other top unrestricted free agents, including Los Angeles Clippers center DeAndre Jordan and Atlanta Hawks forward Paul Millsap. It makes no sense to leave a good team in order to play for a bad team, unless the bad team can present some sort of credible case for why it will improve vastly from one season to the next.
Of course, New York City is an attractive metropolis that affords a high quality of life for wealthy athletes. It also provides a higher market profile, which can bring in lucrative endorsement deals.
But the city cannot lure top talent by itself, and the Knicks have little to offer other than an aging Carmelo and the ardent hope that Jackson, an inexperienced executive, can engineer a championship roster once freed from the yoke of preexisting bad deals, particularly the expiring contracts of Stoudemire and Andrea Bargnani.
The Knicks' initial plan had been to weather this season with whatever they had, perhaps compete for a low playoff seed and then make a play for marquee free agents in the 2015 offseason using newfound cap space. But the outlook for the future seems increasingly bleak.
There are still many different scenarios swirling, including the possibility of Kevin Love opting out of Cleveland, especially if he continues to get benched down the stretch for defensive purposes. But realistically, the Knicks could find the free-agency cupboard bare once the nightmare season ends, especially if they can't find a recipe for some success this season.
The Good (Sort Of)
Enough games remain on the schedule to salvage a degree of respect for this team, and rookie head coach Derek Fisher needs to show some semblance of competency. When Dennis Rodman rips someone's coaching ability and actually sounds like he's expressing a reasonable opinion, you know the coach in question has problems.
At one point during the Jan. 8 loss to the Houston Rockets, instead of drawing up a play during the timeout, Fisher simply implored his team to believe it could win because most human beings put shorts on the same way.
Then again, the Knicks have cycled through personnel and a variety of starting lineups all season, so it's not surprising that the neophyte head coach has been unable to find any consistency. During the Jan. 15 loss in London, Lou Amundson, Lance Thomas, Travis Wear and Langston Galloway each played for at least one-third of the game. That was certainly not the plan coming into the season.
If provided some degree of continuity, Fisher could still carve out a string of wins during the second half of the season, and any modicum of success would be a sorely needed confidence boost. In Jason Kidd's first season coaching the Brooklyn Nets, he hit Jan. 1 with a 10-21 record. His team won 33 of the next 46 games. No one expects that kind of turnaround from Fisher, especially with this roster, but he needs to show something at some point—beyond telling players to believe in themselves.
One positive for the Knicks is that Jackson has proved adept at swinging trades and has actually assigned some value to future draft picks as well. In June, he sent Raymond Felton and Tyson Chandler to Dallas, ostensibly to improve team chemistry, and he helped balance the roster with an August swap that sent guard Wayne Ellington in exchange for stout-bodied forward Quincy Acy.
Jackson may need to cook up another trade to sufficiently improve the Knicks in any significant measure. They are sure to have a high draft pick in the first round due to their heinous number of losses, and sophomore guard Tim Hardaway Jr. carries trade value despite his inconsistent shooting this season.
Either at the trade deadline or come the offseason, the Knicks must perform their due diligence with any and all impact players who hit the trade block, but to their detriment, the Knicks also have precious little of value to trade back in return.
Regardless of the looming bearish free-agency market, which might as well be Zihuatanejo relative to the Knicks, the team must consider how to improve through more trades while also providing Fisher some semblance of roster consistency on a night-to-night basis.
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