A measured and objective portrait of Knicks Assistant GM Walt Perrin
In a league of stars, the New York Knicks are sans-star. Starless. Pitch black. Quiet. An empty NY night sky. What follows are measured and objective portraits of the architects of The Great Knick Rebuild: 20.0. These are our star builders. The everyday heroes who operate in the shadows. In this, the endless offseason, with Knicks basketball a dusty and distant half-memory, take comfort in the existence of these invisible heroes. Beavering tirelessly towards the mythical competitive promise land, or at the very least, somewhere less shitty than here, less shitty than now.
In Part 1 of the series: Walt “The Collector“ Perrin.
You have never done anything as thoroughly as Walt Perrin prepares for an NBA Draft. It’s a fact. Don’t feel bad. Neither have I. It’s an unreasonable bar of preparation with which to measure mere mortals. Perrin has just arrived in New York after 19 seasons successfully sculpting the Utah Jazz. The man who gave him the Jazz job, former executive Kevin O’Connor, described Perrin as a “collector of information,” which is a kind of strange but oddly reassuring description. It evokes compulsion. A need for information. A thirst for facts. You want a guy with that kind of appetite taking on the big, bad NBA Draft.
Every draft is a maelstrom of misinformation. It’s all trapdoors and tripwires. Punks who turn up to the draft without their big-boy pants on walk away with Georgios Papagiannis. It turns out that having “Giannis” in your name is not, in fact, super relevant information-wise. Walter would never. Of course Walt knew about Georgios, he knew everything. He knew what he had for breakfast the day he first touched a basketball as a kid. He also knew he was a big, fat, grinning trapdoor. (It was Spanakopita, by the way, the breakfast. A spinach pie type thing. A taste sensation.)
On a preparation scale, if Vlade Divac is one extreme, Walt Perrin is the other — which is good news for the New York Knicks, who have trended towards the Vlade end of the spectrum for the last 200 years. One of Perrin’s pillars of draft preparation is the sheer volume of young basketball humans he brings in for workouts. Every year, he brings in 80, 90, even 100 guys. When you have one, or two, or sometimes three picks (or even four, hello 2021), this could be seen as overkill. Or it could be seen simply as a man fueled by information. This is how you minimize the risk of disappearing down a draft misinformation manhole, where you’ll get to spend some quality time with Vlade and Co. in the dark, covered in draft doo-doo, weeping in a starless dungeon of painful picks.
Sometimes, he doesn’t even pick a player who came in to workout. He’s not a computer. He’s head and heart. Information and instinct. He works out hundreds of players as due diligence, uses them as an evaluative whetstone, to sharpen his spida-senses. When someone kills a workout, like Donovan Mitchell did in 2017 — a workout that only happened because of Perrin’s relationship with Mitchell’s agent — he’s ready to use this information and move up from the 24th pick to 13th to get his guy. But when he can’t get a guy in for a workout, as he couldn’t for a long while with Rodney Hood, who the Jazz took 23rd in 2014, it doesn’t stop him pulling the trigger on a pick that he believes in. I like this about Walt, this streak of flair — it neatly complements his methodical core.
This isn’t to say he’s infallible, but he insulates himself from possible failure with informed and impeccable preparation. For every miss — every Dante Exum — there are a handful of homegrown and hard-earned hits; Wesley Matthews, Joe Ingles, and Royce O’Neal all went undrafted. Perrin plucked them all from the precarious fringes of NBA existence. He’s doing it right now. Somewhere in New York. For the Knicks. Names are floating around in Walt’s brain today that will be familiar visitors to your brain in five years; tickling your dopamine receptors, starring in your daydreams, triggering your adrenal surges.
It’s comforting that a man of Walt’s caliber is manning the gates of our future thoughts. I don’t want any old riff-raff running around inside my skull in five years; causing havoc, drawing on the walls, tugging on my tear-ducts. I want them to earn the right to define my Friday nights. Maybe that’s why Walt puts all pre-draft candidates through “the Stockton drill.” When I first heard the name, I figured it was a psychological test involving John Stockton, the most boring basketball player of all time. Maybe it’s just you and John in a room, and John tells you the drill will start soon, but it never starts, and you just have to make conversation with John Stockton, for as long as possible, without having a mental meltdown. Torture through small-talk. Tiny-talk. Infinitesimal-talk.
It’s not quite that horrific, though. Players have to speed dribble the length of the floor, using their weak hand, and make a layup six times in 30 seconds, using only three dribbles per trip. Apparently Stockton did it in 28 seconds. It’s one of those things that sounds easy because it’s simple, but would almost certainly make 99% of regular Joe’s and John’s and definitely Jack’s lungs disintegrate. It’s a test of will. Of how far you can push yourself when your heart is having a panic attack. And if players can still walk after this hellish half a minute, they have to go straight into some shooting drills, all Bambi-legs and hyperventilating, to see how they shoot when they can’t feel their extremities.
Walt is nothing if not thorough, which is comforting in this perpetual summer of possibilities. Should we trade up? Trade down? Trade out? By the time draft night comes around, we’ll have exhausted every possible scenario. Knicks Twitter will be ready, armed with 4000 eventualities. We will have the collective readiness of that wild-eyed Charlie Kelly meme dipped in acid and welded onto our optic nerve.
Which will all be for naught when eventuality 4001 saunters into our lives and we furiously tweet-shriek about how James Wiseman and Mitchell Robinson are a sub-optimal pairing. Best just leave it to Walt. All of our musings, however well thought out, can basically be distilled down to, “I hope Walt has all the information he needs.”
Oh sweet child, if there’s one thing we can bank on, it’s that Walt’s doing his homework.
For the most part, sports fandom demands an uncomfortable degree of blind faith in the wisdom of people who have often shown themselves to be emphatically unwise. Most Knicks fans are understandably a few cycles of grief beyond the ability to deposit blind faith in anything but the next franchise failure.
Walt Perrin isn’t a panacea. But he does chip away at the ingrained cynicism of old wounds. He lifts the blindfold a little. Lets in some welcome natural light. It’s comforting to know he’s out there somewhere — beavering away, mapping manholes, hoarding information. Having Walt in the draft day war room may not guarantee us the next Donovan Mitchell, but I’d rather have a Walt than not have a Walt. Kind of like an umbrella. Or a seatbelt. Or some spanakopita — you’d just rather have them, than not.
