Decompression, Part 2: Where do the Knicks go from here?
Last time, Prez broke down the many transactions on draft night that led the Knicks to trading out of the first round of the 2022 NBA Draft. This time, Prez gets into the process of the Knicks’ decision: did they make the right call on draft night?
WHY DID THE KNICKS PASS ON GOOD PLAYERS?
No 500-word intro. Let’s get right into it. There are no less than five quality players, with decent floors and high ceilings, who the Knicks decided they would be better off without in the 2022 NBA Draft. Or, more specifically, they decided they’d be better off with the (significant) haul of firsts from Oklahoma City than with someone at pick 11, and then again better off clearing $13 million for Jalen Brunson than with someone at pick 13. When a team is OK at best and a shit show at worst, without a true blue franchise player, passing on lotto picks like that is playing with fire.
Some of you may follow @ChuckingDarts, host of the Chucking Darts NBA podcast, on Twitter. He’s been on Draft Strickland, our draft pod, a few times. When he releases his big board right before the draft, one question he kicks off evaluations with is ‘’is this player good enough to get minutes right away in the NBA?”.The question is asked in a vacuum, but the idea is that the best developmental path is playing in the NBA, and if you can’t do that early in your career, you might not develop as much as expected. Of course, there are exceptions — some guys explode onto the scene later in their first contract, a la Anfernee Simons, others even later on second contracts. But it’s an important question, particularly for the Knicks’ front office.
Minutes for a pick: taken from whom?
On a team like OKC, the bar to playing time is much lower since they’re tanking and a lot of the young players they have are only 19 or 20. On a team like the Bucks or the Warriors, it’s hard to find PT because of the stars and the vets. A team like the Knicks is in the middle — no stars, but very good depth, and it’s a dogfight for minutes even if you punt all of their vets to the moon. We’ve seen New York’s front office decide against picking very young players time and time again, presumably because they would rather pick players with a mix of upside, but also readiness to contribute soon. That is a strategic decision with consequences — for example, I had Ousmane Dieng very high on my Knicks board, but had they picked him, they would have likely not received meaningful contributions from him for some time — not only because of his project-ness, but also because the guys in front of him are RJ Barrett, Obi Toppin, and Cam Reddish, at minimum. Similarly, AJ Griffin is very young. Would he be a better 2/3 than Quentin Grimes in Year 1? Almost certainly not, despite his historic shooting pedigree. What about Year 2? Better 2 off the bench than IQ? Would the Knicks need to wait til Year 3? What if he continues getting hurt?
But this applies to even prospects viewed as non-projects — would Ben Mathurin out-contribute Grimes this year? Next year? Doubtful. Given even playing time, would he outproduce Deuce? It’s not an open and shut question, not even close. Neither is the question of long-term upside, if we’re being honest. Last year was a historically good guard class, where skill and talent was extremely unrelated to draft pick slot due to the makeup of the class.
What about upperclassmen wing Jalen Williams — would he out-contribute Cam Reddish? I’d argue maybe there’s a chance. Would he get on-ball reps befitting of his pick-and-roll guru prospect profile? Doubtful. This is likely how the front office was evaluating this class. The combination of lower-upside players with a deep Knicks roster of prospects means they might not be able to develop these guys as they would like. They were already pushing this to the limit with someone like Deuce, for example, who hardly played. Personally, I would have taken a swing anyway, particularly on the wing, and banked on minutes freeing up not necessarily this year, but the following year or year after, with players of the style they prefer — upside, but ready to help now, a la Tari Eason or Jalen Williams. I think, for Tari in particular, there were key roles he could play to help right now on defense and offense. I also think AJ Griffin, despite his age and assuming the medicals were ok (he fell to 16, so they very well may not have been ok), could also fulfill a narrow bench shooting role in the short term, allowing him to develop other parts of his game in the meanwhile.
The 2023 class (and others)
I also think the decision to punt was a reflection of the front office’s view of this class. The subsequent classes, especially 2023, likely have far more depth.
The Knicks almost certainly will bring back one player from next year’s class, as they project to have somewhere between one and possibly even three first rounders (though they could always move or consolidate some of those picks), and that class’ depth means you’re gonna need minutes for yet another good prospect. Possibly a Jaden Ivey-level prospect, as there are WAY more of that tier of player next year.
If they want to move up next year, they can do that. If not, someone really good — on the Johnny Davis tier, who is the last guy they were allegedly willing to swing on — will probably be available to them. After they have better evaluated what they have, and after their current prospects have likely taken significant leaps. In the meantime, they decided to flip their picks for a mix of more picks (from OKC), and cap space for Brunson, which is a pretty defensible alternate use of assets given they already have quality development bets with underrated upside (despite what other media will tell you about Obi Toppin and Immanuel Quickley).
MY TAKE
I was mad as hell…at first
At first I was furious because to me combing the draft and prophesying about which fine-on-the-surface prospect is a star in waiting is what I spend inordinate time thinking about, and I am pretty certain that there was a stud in waiting available to them. Initially, trading out seemed like tossing out the entire valuable strategy of getting really strong excess long-term value out of draft picks. It seemed like a total own goal. But as time passed, given the high bar for minutes, the weakness of the class, and the strength of future classes, it seemed a bit more practical and less extreme.
Was it a vote in favor of the current NYK prospects? I think so.
I suspect the decision to punt was mostly a vote by the Knicks braintrust in favor of keeping minutes for the guys they have. Hopefully that means Grimes, Obi, IQ, Mitch, Sims, and maybe Deuce (and maybe Rokas? Let me dream, lol). But they HAVE to walk the walk, which means they can’t beat around the elephant in the room: Coach Thibs. There is a path for this team to have its cake and eat it too, developing talent while having that talent contribute to winning right now, just like how any of these annoying Twitter darling teams like Memphis or New Orleans do.
But they have to actually do it. Leon talking about building off end-of-season play and leaning into player development in some press statement means literally nothing. If you don’t want to take on new worthwhile development bets, you damn sure better utilize the ones you already have. It doesn’t mean punt all the vets, but it does mean punt some of them.
I’d also be completely dishonest if I told you the way the scramble for Ivey unfolded didn’t also color my real time view of what happened.
It’s hard to separate the what from the how.
The Kings choosing to take Keegan Murray outright rather than whatever offers were being thrown at them was a hell of a wrench, and the seeming openness of Detroit to a Jalen Duren plus picks package for Ivey seemed fleetingly possible. After all, Ivey isn’t some Cade Cunningham level prospect, as amazing as he is — he’s closer to a Jalen Suggs, who i’m sure if he was on the Knicks and performed how he did in Orlando would be referred to as a horrible, no good, very awful, irredeemable bust. Which he is not, for the record. Not yet anyway. So I thought the Knicks had a chance! For something REALLY LUCKY to happen to them, for once!
(You know, like jumping in the lottery, having the right pick in the right talent-flush class, having a consensus monster draft talent inexplicably fall to you, having a Julius Randle become a multi-time All-NBA guy and not just be a one-off year for the history books, etc… all the things that don’t happen to the Knicks.)
To pivot from something so tangibly wonderful and hopeful — a young stud who collapses defense with elite athleticism — to something so purely rote, sanitized, and mathematic as asset and cap space accumulation, was an absolute gut punch. Doubly so because of Thibs’ history of deprioritizing the young players who can contribute. The front office’s 180 in draft plan followed by visions of a rotation made up of significant minutes for Burks, Rose, Julius, Fournier, Taj, and Noel was unbearable in the heat of the draft. And that’s without getting into the fact that seemingly everything about the draft is leaked early except the details on trades involving the Knicks, and half of us thought the Knicks traded a first to move off of Kemba’s deal.
Really exploring what they did bit by bit, and examining the question of whether my preferred prospects had clear avenues to Year 1 or Year 2 contribution helped cool my head a bit, and put me in a place where even if I disagreed with the punt, I understood it. It was defensible, and in many ways prudent. By balancing asset accumulation and the prospects they have in hand, the Knicks have a way forward — one where several young players are positioned to take leaps, with the newly-acquired Jalen Brunson on board. RJ finally has an impact ball handler to play off of. IQ can more easily balance scoring and playmaking and focus on improving penetration vs. bent defenses. Obi and Mitch have a point guard who is capable of scoring efficiently at the rim and playmaking, for the first time.
Those improvements — and the minutes they require — are right there, waiting to be had, and all the while the Knicks are positioned as probably one of the four most asset-flush teams in the league. That’s a hell of a combination. I see the vision, even if it’s not my vision. After all, that’s the tricky part of being a draft fan: I want Vassell, they take Obi. I want Bane, they take IQ. I want Grimes, they… take Grimes! I want another guy, they pass. Finding our personal line between “difference of opinion’’ and “poor decision” seems easy, but if you follow draft stuff for years, you inevitably get a bit of humility and humble pie – and as a result, are less quick to judge the vision of others. Let’s see what Leon shakes out of the tree, shall we?
