Leon Rose was hired to bring in a star — he ended up breaking a curse
What if the Knicks’ long-awaited messiah wasn’t a player, but a president?
Leon Rose was Jonny Flynn’s agent when Minnesota selected the point guard sixth in the 2009 draft. The Timberwolves held the fifth and sixth picks that year and everyone knew they needed help at the point. Few could have guessed the Wolves would use both picks on point guards, though most could have guessed how it’d work out. It didn’t.
For Adam and Eve, the original sin was eating the forbidden fruit. For the New York Knicks for 50 years, it’s been valuing Xs and Os less than the names atop the MSG marquee. Last night while the surging Mets were beating the sinking Yankees, Rose not only absolved the franchise of that sin, but in acquiring Mikal Bridges from the Brooklyn Nets he may have pulled off what no human has since William Holzman care of Earl Monroe back in 1972: putting the finishing touch on a Knicks championship team. If Rose did indeed pull off the impossible, he did it by pulling off the impossible.
Landing Bridges meant building one, meaning Rose overcame the weird 11th Commandment that exists across all Metropolitan-area sports: thou shalt not trade with they neighbor. This always seems such a queer, small-town attitude for a place like New York — this isn’t a one-shot city. People don’t live here, try once, fail once and leave. New Yorkers survive, they evolve, they figure out the odds and ends and rackets and mess around the margins until they make them work. So what if you make a trade that helps an inter-borough rival win? You’re the New York Yankees/Metropolitans/Knickerbockers! Your pockets are deep enough to try again. Seeing these teams afraid to trade with each other is like those old cartoons where an elephant is terrified by a mouse. Diffidence ain’t a good look, particularly when you’re a billion-dollar organization.
Even as it became rom-com obvious this season that the Knicks and Nets were a perfect trading match, there seemed better odds a snowball would rise to rule Hell than Rose and Sean Marks would ever talk. We’re only about a decade removed from billboards near MSG fanning tensions that go back to when the Nets first came over from the ABA, when the Knicks — who were not then and never have been some mom-and-pop operation — demanded everything short of blood from a stone before agreeing to the Nets moving into their “market.” The obvious attraction Bridges and several Knicks felt/feel for each other only added to the tension. Act II is always the hardest part of a story to write because you’re trying to balance hope and heartache.
Balance has evaded Knick rosters going back to when Richard Nixon was still better known for being an asshole than a criminal. New York’s first legitimate championship hopes post-’73 began when Patrick Ewing arrived, yet despite him lauded as the NBA’s next all-time center the organization moved him to power forward, preferring to keep Bill Cartwright at the pivot. Twin Towers teams have a mixed record of success: Hakeem Olajuwon joined Ralph Sampson on a Rockets team that reached the Finals; Tim Duncan and David Robinson won two titles together; DeMarcus Cousins and Anthony Davis did not. Like interim New York Governor David Paterson, Ewing/Cartwright was short-lived and not missed.
In 1992 Charles Smith might have worked fine replacing Charles Oakley, but losing Xavier McDaniel led the Knicks to pair Smith and Oak at the forward spots, and as the old proverb states, “He who has two starting power forwards has none.” Smith was stuck out of position and the Knicks were stuck with him on Scottie Pippen. Redundancy redux reached rock bottom in 2006, after a 12-month hellscape pockmarked by Isiah Thomas bringing in the 7-foot Jerome James, the 7-foot Eddy Curry and the 6-11 Jared Jeffries. Five years later came the Carmelo Anthony/Amar’e Stoudemire Frankenstein monster.
The Melo trade was the curse Rose had to break to prove he’s not a transactional leader, but the transformative one generations of Knicks fans lived and died dreaming of. In 2011, same as now, the Knicks fancied themselves a team on the rise, featured a top-10 MVP candidate and after a period of slight sustained success felt it was time to parlay pieces of their little engine that could into something closer to a bullet train. Then, as now, they gave up a lot. But this time is different.
When Alexander the Great was faced with the Gordian knot, he solved an unsolvable problem with the most basic of tactics: brute force. He couldn’t untie the knot, so he sliced it in half. When Rose was faced with the Gotham knot – making the Knicks a title-contender – he too applied force, though judiciously; power without leverage is like a gun with no ammo, merely a blunt object. He could have traded the farm for Donovan Mitchell back when Danny Ainge was in heat. Mitchell was feening to be a Knick. Rose would have won the backpages – or the site headers, I guess, since so few people actually read newspapers anymore. He would have done what James Dolan hired him to do: another star for the marquee. Never mind a backcourt featuring two 6-foot-1 scoring guards who are best with the ball in their hands. Let the coach worry about that until he’s fired sooner than later for not fitting a round peg into a square hole.
Assuming – and you know what they say about that – OG Anunoby and Julius Randle remain Knicks, Bridges walks in the door essentially replacing Bojan Bogdanović and with two years left on his deal, a far cry from Melo demanding a new deal before agreeing to the trade, replacing Danilo Gallinari and Wilson Chandler and ultimately downgrading the starting five at both the starting point and center spots. I mentioned Pippen earlier for a reason: he was a Hall of Fame role player, similar to Manu Ginóbili in that he could have scored 25 a game as the best player on a team that maxed out reaching the second round, but instead sublimated his skills in uplifting a dynastic collective over himself. Bridges isn’t being asked to be the best player on the team. He isn’t being slotted into a position he’s never performed before. The range of roles he’s performed so well to this point is precisely the range the Knicks are asking for from him: some nights closer to the five-fingers-form-a-fist Voltron he helped form in Phoenix, some nights more of the Nightwing temp savior work he did at Barclays.
Sweating the loss of all the draft picks Brooklyn’s getting? Statistically those players are more likely to travel by blimp than make an NBA All-Star team. Jalen Brunson’s ascent unto godhood and the OG trade sped up the timetable to contend – it’s now. The Knicks traded all three of their picks next year (two firsts and a second), plus three more unprotected firsts and an unprotected swap and a second. But they have three picks in tonight’s draft. If they keep them, those players will still be on their rookie deals when the Nets are (hopefully) picking 25-30 in 2029.
The Knicks came into this season looking to make The Big Move. Before the current Dickensian CBA rules went into effect, many figured that would be a trade for a superstar. If you’d told yourself 365 days ago “365 days from now, RJ Barrett, Immanuel Quickley, Quentin Grimes, Bogdanović, five first-round picks, three seconds and a swap will all be gone,” who/what would you have thought the Knicks got back? Giannis Antetokounmpo? Joel Embiid? Grant Hill? (Sorry, some dreams last longer than others) That’s a lot for any one player, yet not radically off from what Ainge wanted for Mitchell, or got for Rudy Gobert. Instead it’s the price Rose paid to acquire OG and Bridges, a pair of All-Defensive wing studs who make the Knicks as good a match-up versus the current champs as anyone. Even if we add the cost of likely losing Isaiah Hartenstein in light of adding Bridges, there’s another feather in Don Leon’s cap: the Knicks will likely be weaker at the 5, but mindfully, as a result of strengthening themselves at probably the most important position(s) a team today can. That is the polar opposite of making Ewing a power forward or thinking that Stoudemire would benefit from playing alongside the ultimate ball-stopper.
The 2009 Timberwolves recognized a weakness and tried to overwhelm it. It took them another 15 years to win a playoff series. The Knicks spent a half-century chasing names to pair with players with similar games, over and over again. Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden for their sin. If Mikal Bridges, seemingly forbidden yet so tantalizingly close, helps the Knicks win it all, the Garden will be Eden once more, and Knicks fans everywhere will offer up prayers of thanks to St. Leon.
