A MODEST PROPOSAL, REJECTED

Some post-trade deadline thoughts. For the prequel to this post, click here. But if you don’t want to click there, I’ll save you some time and excerpt the thesis:

…once upon a time, moral victories were enough to get Knicks fans through the losses. In winning last year, we have lost the strongest coping mechanism to deal with the losses this year.

All this to say that in advance of the trade deadline, I would like the Front Office to choose a direction. If that’s pushing some chips in on Jalen Brunson or other win-now additions, I support it. If that’s selling off pieces like Alec Burks to make room for our young players, I would support that. But whatever the Front Office does, I want them to make a choice and not to hedge, because the most loyal fan base in the world deserves a team with strong leadership and a clear idea of where we’re going.

It was a modest proposal: in the wake of our difficult season, choose a path and either take a step forward or a step back.

And yet, at the deadline, the Knicks did nothing.

Why is this so frustrating?

At first glance, when surveying the litany of deals made by other teams at the deadline, it’s difficult to find one that the Knicks should have been in on. As KFS’ Jeremy Cohen pointed out, multi-year contracts were not exchanged for expiring salary: expiring contracts were only swapped for other one-year deals, and multi-year deals were only swapped for other long-term deals. This implies a reluctance among front offices around the league to trade for long-term contracts without incentivization, and a reluctance for front offices such as the Knicks to incentivize those deals.

From that, we can infer that the Knicks Front Office was not willing to incentivize offloading Alec Burks’ deal for the sake of clearing rotation minutes for their recent wing acquisition Cam Reddish.

Yet many Knicks fans are distressed over the absence of execution of such a relatively minor transaction because this small failure is just a symptom of larger failures and dysfunction within Knicks organization this year.

During free agency, the Knicks paid their good soldier veterans of yesteryear contracts that were largely praised for their flexibility. “Flexibility” is a nice way of saying that if the Knicks were to experience the worst-case scenario for each of those contracts, the Front Office could easily maneuver out of them.

This year, none of the new deals signed in the offseason have provided positive value on the court aside from Alec Burks. Thus, many hopes of Knicks fans were fixed on the removal of his contract in exchange for some type of marginal draft compensation.

Indeed, I went to bed the night before the trade deadline excited by the pathetic notion of swapping his and Noel’s salary for Dragic and a lowly second round pick or two, as was rumored on Twitter. I allowed myself to fantasize about a scenario where the Knicks could clear cap space and possibly add an asset to make a run at Jalen Brunson or another role player in the summer.

When the clock struck 3PM EST the following afternoon, The Knicks were unable to move the best contract they signed in the offseason without incentivization. Thus, the flexibility of the deals they signed six months ago was overstated and overpraised, and we can finally judge the offseason decisions made by the Front Office as poor.

It is time to admit that there is dysfunction within this organization, and our frustrations with the team’s inactivity at the deadline is largely frustration with the lack of alignment between team’s Head Coach, Tom Thibodeau, and the Front Office.

The most obvious symptom of this dissonance is Thibs’ insistence on playing Alec Burks over Cam Reddish. With the Reddish trade, the Front Office seemed to acknowledge that the rest of the season was more valuable as a runway for the development of younger players on the roster; they believed this enough to sacrifice a first round pick to add one sooner rather than later.

Yet they did not trade a rotation player for Cam, and so Thibs did what Thibs has done repeatedly in the past: he threw a young player into the fire of competition with veteran teammates for minutes. If Cam wanted to take Burks’ playing time, he was going to have to earn it, and if the Front Office wanted to clear those minutes for Cam regardless of his ability, they were going to have to remove Burks from the roster.

This hurdle for both Cam and the Front Office was made more difficult because, due to Derrick Rose’s injuries and Kemba Walker’s apathy toward playing competitive basketball, Tom Thibodeau has insisted on playing Alec Burks out of position at point guard for large stretches of the season. This clearly hurt his value as a trade asset and contributed to the Front Office’s paralysis at the deadline.

But Alec Burks is a solid role player on a fair contract. Under normal circumstances, we should be fine with the decision to retain him, and even pleased about it.

Yet the circumstances we live in as Knick fans are a toxic combination of a Head Coach determined to win at all costs, and a Front Office that did not give him adequate tools to win.

Fans generally continue to direct their ire toward either Thibodeau or Julius Randle; both of whom have served as a buffer between Leon Rose and a hot seat. As soon as Thibs is gone, the proverbial microscope will be on Leon.

I do not mean to suggest that inactivity at the trade deadline is a fireable offense for Knicks President of Basketball Operations Leon. However, Leon’s vision for the team was not adequately expressed to fans and he continues to move behind a curtain.

In the past, we’ve drawn reasonable conclusions of what Leon’s intentions are based on his actions, but with poor and contradictory decisions, those intentions have become more opaque.

So another modest proposal: maybe it’s time, more than two years after his initial hiring, that fans received a clear explanation of Leon Rose’s vision for the future of team. Because I, for one, am tired of guessing what it might be.