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 promised land, or at the very least, somewhere less shitty than here, less shitty than now. 

In Part 2 of the series: Brock “The Diabolical Genius” Aller.

(Check out Part 1, featuring Walt “The Collector” Perrin, if you haven’t already!)

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t describe anyone in my contacts as a diabolical genius. I wouldn’t describe any of them as a bog-standard run of the mill genius. I wouldn’t describe any of them as in any way diabolical, either. And from this I can conclude that being both diabolical and a genius — being a diabolical genius — is pretty damn rare. Like “spotting a snow leopard sunbathing in your local park” levels of rarity. A devilish snow leopard. Listening to an advanced conversational Spanish podcast. Casually pawing at a Rubik’s cube.

And so it’s understandable, really, that Knicks kingpin Leon Rose’s first act as President of Basketball Operations was to hire Brock Aller away from the Cleveland Cavaliers’ front office. Former Cavs GM David Griffin described Aller as “a diabolical genius from a cap standpoint,” which may be the best off-the-cuff description of anyone, ever. 

He also has a suspiciously fiction-friendly name: Brock Aller. Special Agent Brock Aller. The Asset you send in to take out The Asset. 

“Send in The Asset. “

“Which one?”

“Send the genius.”

“The boring genius?”

“No, the diabolical one.”

“…the Diabolical Genius?”

“…yes.”

The room is filled with a heavy silence. Everyone involved lets between one and two thimbles of excited wee escape.

Meet the new VP of Basketball and Strategic Planning for your New York Knicks: Special Agent Brock Aller, AKA The Diabolical Genius, AKA The Meta Asset. Excuse the hyperbole — it’s just that, strategy has not been a strong point for the Knicks in recent years. The franchise’s team building strategy has been to scream its location as loudly as possible, over and over and over again, whilst furiously flaunting fistfuls of cash at literally everyone. That’s basically it, strategy-wise: an address and a bank account.

You see, we deserve Brock Aller. We’ve earned him. Call it cap karma. The Knicks have consistently turned players and contracts that should be assets into non-assets, whilst Aller and the Cavs have consistently turned non-assets into assets. The difference is one of extremes. It’s trading Elfrid Payton for Steph Curry. It’s craprobatics vs. caprobatics. It’s diabolical buffoonery vs. diabolical genius.

Let’s get into some examples of the chasm of strategic competence between Aller’s Cavs and Forever’s Knicks. I warn you, these may sting a little. But relax, these are happy words, a little needle of nostalgia to vaccinate us from tomorrow’s would-be bed shitting.

On July 12, 2014, The Cavaliers acquired the corpse of Brendan Haywood and the draft rights to forward Dwight Powell from the Charlotte Hornets in exchange for guard Scotty Hopson and cash considerations. But the trade had nothing to do with Hayward the player, and everything to do with Hayward’s contract, which jumped from $2 million in 2014 to a non-guaranteed $10.5m in the 2015-16 season. Hayward’s contract was grandfathered in from the previous CBA. The Cavs traded him the next offseason, and in the process created a larger cap exception and some financial flexibility. They signed him specifically to trade him, to capitalize on a one-time contractual quirk in the transition between CBA’s.

On the same day, July 12, 2014, Carmelo Anthony agreed to a five-year, $124 million extension with the Knicks. The extension included a no trade clause. Only Phil Jackson, then in his first year as Knicks President, knows whether he could have avoided the no trade clause. Well, that’s not strictly true. Leon Rose, the current Knicks president — and Melo’s former agent — could probably shed some insight into the negotiations too. Once he’d stopped chuckling, that is. Regardless, the existence of the no trade clause torpedoed the value of the contract as an asset and drastically reduced the options the Knicks would have had to maximize the return on a generational talent.

On the Jan. 7, 2015, the Cavs traded for Timofey Mozgov. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say it was the culmination of a series of seemingly insignificant, but deliberate and creative moves, designed to turn a non-asset into an asset, and specifically, $1.6m of cap space into a starting center in the NBA Finals.

Later that year, on the 25th of June, whilst Mozgov was still icing his knees after falling to the Golden State Warriors in six games, the Knicks traded Tim Hardaway Jr. to the Atlanta Hawks whilst he was still on his rookie contract. You know the sordid details. They overpaid in restricted free agency to get him back in 2017. Then they paid a tax in talent to offload him in 2019 in the Kristaps Porzingis trade. It was the culmination of a series of increasingly idiotic but depressingly predictable moves, designed to turn an asset into a non-asset, and specifically, an average young player into the emotional castration of an entire fanbase.

My personal favorite demonstration of the strategic divergence between the two franchises is the respective buffoonery and genius of two contracts handed out to two NBA extras — Ron Baker and Patrick McCaw.

The McCaw contract was so wonderfully bizarre, it prompted an investigation by the NBA. It was also brilliantly petty on the Cavs’ part. After winning a championship with the Golden State Warriors, McCaw turned down a $5.2 million extension and became a restricted free agent. But without any interest from other teams, McCaw remained on the Warriors as the 2018 season began, with Golden State refusing to renounce his rights when they had no means of signing anyone to replace him, already deep into the luxury tax.

The Cavs had faced the Warriors in four straight summers, were still smarting after being swept in the 2018 Finals, and had just watched LeBron James walk away in free agency, again. It’s possible Cavs owner Dan Gilbert harbored slight bitterness towards the “lightyears ahead” Warriors franchise. So he — and Brock Aller, presumably — did a petty thing. On December 31st, they signed McCaw to a two-year, $6 million offer sheet, which put the Warriors between the rock of an eye-watering tax bill and the relative hard place of losing a fringe rotation player. They chose the hard place.

The offer sheet, though, included a clause that let the Cavaliers off the hook for the contract if McCaw was waived by Jan. 7. After sparse minutes in three games, on Jan. 7, McCaw was waived. On Jan. 9, McCaw signed a one-year deal with the Toronto Raptors as an unrestricted free agent, and would win his third NBA title against his former team later that year. But we don’t care about McCaw. We care about Brock Aller having the necessary level of comfort with the salary cap to be able to successfully give Gilbert the satisfaction of stripping Golden State of an asset, purely out of spite. 

The Knicks, by comparison, operate with the doddering incompetence of a toddler with a toy calculator, which was painfully evident in Ron Baker’s head-scratcher of an extension. In the summer of 2017, a couple of weeks after Phil Jackson was fired, Steve Mills picked up the baton of blindly distributing no trade clauses, and gave Baker a gaudy two-year, $8.9 million deal. The extension included an inexplicable de-facto no trade clause that toy calculators struggle to detect, rendering his already wildly bloated contract about as useful as a chocolate radiator. Baker was waived in Dec. 2018. 

If only Brock Aller had been in the room when Ron Baker signed his extension. If we’d had a diabolical genius in the room, he likely would have pointed out that the whole contract was colossally dumb, and that no trade clause would never have happened. Instead, in this alternative Aller-driven reality, the Baker extension would probably have included something equally as genius as Ron’s no trade clause was moronic. It would have to be groundbreaking. The first contract of its kind. A beyond-basketball-clause, maybe.

We’d have traded Ron’s hair to the Sacramento Kings for a top-59 protected second round pick in 2025, the rights to his children’s book to the Orlando Magic for a pick swap in 2032, and the rest of a bald Ron Baker to the Aller-less Cavs for LeBron James’ entire bloodline until the end of the century, whereby the rights to the bloodline are relinquished in exchange for two top-10 protected picks from whichever NBA team LeBron Corporation owns. 

Unless LeBrorp owns the Knicks in 2100, in which case: 1) Yay, no Dolan!, and 2) Brock Aller must have his own hologram banner digitally dangled from the rafters of MSG, proclaiming: 

“Brock Aller, the 21st Century: Less dumb stuff. More smart stuff.”

I’ll admit, it is a bit farfetched to devote increasingly scarce hologram-banner real estate to a VP of Basketball and Strategic Planning, but I’m sure we can squeeze him in between a couple of retired jerseys. Maybe between Frank Ntilikina’s number 11 and Bronny James III’s number 23. 

After all, even in ridiculous futuristic fantasy worlds, diabolical geniuses are pretty damn rare.