NoDopeOnSundays wrote:The last couple years of them punting on the draft has come back to bite them in the ass, with how injury prone Mitch is they should have made it a point to get a center sometime in the last 3 years as an insurance policy. In 2022 Walker Kessler went 22, now if we want to get him we're gonna need to dance with the devil, if they want Nick Richards it's going to be more costly than it would have been to just buy a pick and draft him.
How they viewed the draft was really shortsighted.
I don't necessarily agree that how they viewed the draft the last 2 years was short sided in a vacuum. Remember, entering the 2022 draft the rotation featured 3 rookie scale players with at least 2 years left on their deal (Quickley, Grimes, Toppin) and we had all our own draft picks plus 1 extra (Dallas). At the time, the two guys we would have drafted at #11 - Jalen Williams or Jalen Duran - played similar positions to guys we were about to invest in - RJ Barrett and Mitchell Robinson.
Now in hindsight - a lot of things broke against the Knicks after this trade:
1) Barrett got paid and then regressed/wasn't a fit with Brunson, which resulted in the Knicks needing the include Quickley to swap Barrett for a better fitting piece in Anunoby instead of flipping IQ for another 1st rd pick and recycling the rookie scale years
2) Mitch's injury issues became worse, which was compounded by Hartenstein having a breakout year and earning a contract that the Knicks could not afford to match
3) Obi Toppin fell out of favor and was given away for nothing, basically as a favor to his agent
4) Quentin Grimes lost all his value. While Duce becoming a serviceable back of the rotation player on a good contract offset some of this, many of us thought Grimes was a starting level 3 and D guard.
5) The 2023 Dallas pick that we thought was lined up to be high teens/low 20's in a strong draft turned into a mid 20's pick in a weak draft while our own pick sat in that same range
But at the time the rationale for trading the 11th pick in 2022 for future assets given the landscape of the roster and draft made sense. The bigger issue here is that we needed to include Kemba Walker's contract in this trade so the value of the picks we got back was limited. This could all end up working itself out if the DET picks conveys in the 9-14 range in either 2026 or 2027, but as trade assets those picks hold limited value.
I think the Josh Hart trade was a perfect example of the kind of trade you can step up and make when you stockpile picks. Same thing with the Cam Reddish trade (which was essentially a late teens 2021 pick for a former lotto pick who struggled halfway through his rookie deal). Again, at the time we owned a 2023 protected Dallas pick and a 2025 protected MIL pick which held the same value as the 2023 protected NY pick that we traded for Hart. And without Hart, we might not be the 5th seed and in a winnable playoff series against Cleveland in 2023.
So really outside of needing the include Kemba in the 2022 draft night deal, which was a result of a very poorly planned 2021 offseason (it never made sense to double down on that 2021 team without creating a direct path to cap space), I don't think it's fair to say things were short sided.
However, when you take the 5 things that backfired above, and combine it with the decision to put all the chips into the Mikal Bridges trade, you end up in a situation where the lack of investment in the 2022 and 2023 draft is coming back to hurt the organization. But again, had Grimes developed into a dependable starting caliber 3 and D wing or if Barrett developed enough to be flipped straight up for OG the need to overpay for Bridges combined with including IQ and/or Grimes in the deal (or being able to flip one of them to balance out the roster) would have changed the narrative completely.
And let's call a spade a spade with Leon Rose. He's put the most successful Knicks product on the floor in 25 years, which is really the result of Jalen Brunson turning into a star. But he's been up and down at best and the cost to put this roster together was way too expensive for what this roster is.
RIP mags
