douggood wrote:KnicksGadfly wrote:thebuzzardman wrote:Bingo. Luxury pick by a team that couldn't afford it. Decided to take a weird flyer on French Knox
Think there was an article posted a while back about the cap gymnastics required to get KAT. They got Dadiet to take 80% of the rookie scale, which was key to the deal (to be fair, they paid his exit fee). If the cap weren't an issue, we probably would have grabbed Dunn and probably Kolek in that spot. Then again, if the cap weren't an issue, we'd still have Randle probably.
kat trade happened 3 months after the draft, one didnt hinge on the other. though it did help, but the kat trade would have happened none the less.
knicks paid 850k buyout, dadiet took a 900k discount, (note it was only for 1 year) his salary jumps to regular 120% of rookie scale starting next year)
Hmm this is the article I was referencing.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5834911/2024/10/11/karl-anthony-towns-trade-how-it-happened/If Dadiet had signed a typical first-round contract, then the Knicks would not have Karl-Anthony Towns today — or, at least, they could not have acquired Towns the way they did.
The weekend before the preseason began, New York agreed to its second colossal transaction of the summer, sending Julius Randle and Donte DiVincenzo to the Minnesota Timberwolves for Towns, a man the Knicks had kept in the corner of their sightline for years. But the trade hardly ended with those three people.
Inside a league littered with talk of aprons, salary-cap eccentricities and a longer list of don’ts than dos, the Knicks have mastered the minutiae. The construction of the Bridges trade, which was completed in July, hard-capped New York’s 2024-25 payroll at $188.9 million, a threshold called the second apron. After the Towns deal, the Knicks project to be just $335,000 short of that number once the regular season begins.
Had Dadiet taken $2.7 million instead of $1.8 million — which the Knicks made up for by paying Dadiet’s $850,000 buyout in Germany, a deposit that does not count against the cap — the Towns trade would have sent them above the second apron and thus not been allowed by the league.
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The Knicks’ front office, ever since taking over the franchise in 2020, has become infatuated with marginal value, an obsession that emerged long before its creativity with Dadiet. The Knicks have prioritized contracts that descend year over year, handing one to Jalen Brunson and another to Robinson. If either of those players had signed deals that included conventional, annual raises, the team wouldn’t have had this room for Towns.
On the same night they drafted Dadiet, the Knicks moved their other pick out of the first round. The following afternoon, they traded back up to choose Tyler Kolek, their target all along, in the second round.
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Rose and company are still playing the salary-cap game. The Knicks employ 12 players on guaranteed contracts and, by league rule, will have to keep at least two more into the regular season. Training camp invitee Landry Shamet will likely remain, league sources said. The other spot, because the team is up against the hard cap, will have to go to a rookie on a minimum salary.
New York has treaded so close to the second apron that most training camp invitees can’t even practice, let alone play in games. If they are on Exhibit 10 deals, which allow the Knicks to keep their G League rights after releasing them, and they get hurt during team activities, their contracts become guaranteed, which would throw off the financials.