Lucky number 800 falls on a Wednesday and just in time to drive me back into a sports conversation. This 1o minute talk isn’t so much about the playing of sports as it is about the paying of sports. The off season is about contract negotiations and maneuvering around those fairness rules designed to keep all the best players from loading up on one team.
We know from Ray Allen’s defection to the Heat that the rules are broken. In fact, they’ve been broken in spirit for a long time. The way the rules are broken are not the way it seems on the surface. The way the rules are broken is that they unduly penalize teams for bad signings. The Knicks signed a slew of players who they thought were good and would work together. Fast forward to 2012 and we are looking at a team that needs to manipulate the system through sign and trade in order to get enough mid-level players to form a deep veteran bench. They are so hopelessly over the salary cap that signing a guy like Jeremy Lin, a decent but flash in the pan player, is going to cost them a huge penalty in the long run. Worst of all, cutting players doesn’t solve the problem. The only way to unload mistakes is to trade them to a team, leveraging away your future, in most cases, to do so.
The Knicks have a deep front court but cannot afford a backcourt or any players of the caliber needed to slow down the Heat, or perhaps even the Nets at this point. My personal belief is that Carmelo is the problem. While a gifted scorer, he is simply a black hole on the offensive end of the court. Once he gets the ball, it is not going to be in anyone else’s hand, effectively making him the end-user of the offensive play. Like a geek with a laptop, he will only pass it back to an experienced offensive technician in the event a problem arises he can’t handle himself. We know how rarely he believes that happens. There is a theory that he needs the ball to stay motivated, to find his shot, etc. unfortunately, he is teemed with spot op shooters and drivers that need a dynamic passing point guard to coexist. He cannot coexist with said point, and this has created offensive struggles, the only reason we didn’t see that in the playoffs is because the point guard in question was not there.
The Knicks cannot move ‘melo, even if they wanted to. Nobody wants that monstrous contract. S they need to commit to building around him, which they can hardly do given cap restraints. So, as a result of poor planning over the years, they won’t be good for many more years unless the players they have become the players NY needs them to be and in a hurry.