b-ball forever wrote:Trading for Barbs or Diaw wudn't be mortgaging the Knicks future at all since they're both still young and haven't entered their primes yet, specially Barbs since he's on a cheap contract
But it really would. The Knicks are not in need of quality young players that aren't franchise level talents (which Diaw and Barbosa are not). They need a franchise level talent to build around. Their best way, aside from getting lucky in the draft, is to free up enough salary cap to sign one (which appears to be Walsh's plan). Taking on $16 million in the summer of 2010 and $17 million in the summer of 2011 (2 key FA summers for NY) is crazy.
Doesn't matter if Barbosa is on a cheap contract since NY already several young athletic combo guards already under contract (Crawford and Nate Robinson both have strengths that are best suited for D'Antoni's SSOL system...honestly even more so than Barbosa). Even just on a need standpoint, what they need is a PG which Barbosa (and obviously Diaw) is not (both Crawford and Robinson are much more apt at playing the PG position than Barbosa).
As far a Diaw goes, NY also has a plethora of athletic young front court players (Lee, Chandler, Balkman) as well as one (all of who can run and dunk and play uptempo), Zach Randolph, who is still under contract and must be jettisoned (aka what many people refer as the "Impossible Task") to make Diaw even remotely make sense.
Again, the article that popped up in the NY papers about this is rubbish. Walsh was vehement (eyes bugging and all) that there is no way he'd do this particular trade and that 2010 free agency is the main goal for NY.
There is no way he would take Diaw and Barbosa unless Phoenix takes similar length contracts (Randolph, Curry and Jeffries are the 3 players whose contracts extend for 3 more years). And even then they'd still be trading players with 3 years left on their contracts for players with 4 years left on the contracts (and 2011...even if they kept everyone they have...they'd see $25 million fall from their cap naturally...which would not happen even if they did the deals involving the players I just mentioned...and that has nothing to do with Phoenix not wanting them cause it would never even get to Kerr's desk for him to decline).
Diaw and Barbosa does what to help NY become a legit franchise? Exactly, not much of anything, so by trading for them and giving up on capspace that they could possibly throw at guys like Lebron, Wade and Bosh (aka guys that actually could help legitimize their franchise) is mortgaging their future...without a doubt.
