Revisiting the Kristaps Porzingis trade
Isiah Thomas. Larry Brown. Stephon Marbury. Donnie Walsh. Mike D’Antoni. Carmelo Anthony. Phil Jackson.
Etc.
Etc.
Etc. …
Messy divorces are just par for the course for the Knicks.
For as consistently shit as the 21st century Knicks have been, star power, controversy, and intrigue have never been in short supply. Big name coaches and executives arrive in grandiose style only equaled by their inevitably acrimonious departures shortly thereafter. High profile players are feted upon arrival, only to be slandered when they are unceremoniously sent packing.
Yet, even with all of that, I don’t know a single Knicks fan who can claim they weren’t caught completely unaware by the Kristaps Porzingis trade in late January 2019. Within an hour of reports leaking that the presumed franchise player had expressed disillusionment with management in a meeting with then-team president Steve Mills and still-general manager Scott Perry, a deal sending him to the Dallas Mavericks was confirmed.
The Knicks shipped out their much-ballyhooed young star along with the contracts of Tim Hardaway Jr., Courtney Lee, and Trey Burke, for Dennis Smith Jr., two first round picks (2021 unprotected, 2023 top-10 protected), and the expiring contracts of DeAndre Jordan and Wesley Matthews. Within an hour, the courses of both franchises were drastically altered.
The Mavericks had cashed in major draft capital, a former lottery pick, and significant cap flexibility for a chance to pair Porzingis with generational prodigy Luka Doncic. What they were getting out of the deal was concrete.
The Knicks’ return was far less certain. Porzingis’ injury concerns were significant, but it had long been presumed the franchise would hand him a full max contract when the time came in the summer. Instead, the Knicks chose to move the All-Star big man in deal that cleared their books after the season and opened up double max cap space for a free agency period in which Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, and a bevy of other All-Stars hit the market.
Sure, there were a couple of other goodies involved, and first round picks (as Knicks fans know all too well) are significant assets; but the deal was made with eyes on landing a pair of marquee stars in free agency. It was bold, it was brave; but what it did not turn out to be was successful.
Instead, as we all know now, the Knicks struck out, and signed a bunch of middling veterans who largely gave them the ability to roll their cap space over another year or more. Whatever your thoughts on their chosen path in free agency, it certainly wasn’t how Mills and Perry envisioned things would unfold when they made a franchise-altering trade.
Much has been said about the deal since. Many lampooned the team at the time, and even more did after they had to settle on Julius Randle as their primary acquisition in the summer. The crescendo of criticism only grew louder through the year, peaking in the Orlando bubble as Porzingis put up big numbers after the NBA restart. Most recently, however, it’s many Knicks fans who have been crowning themselves victors of the trade after the Latvian was ruled out of the postseason with a right meniscus tear, and the Mavs fell to the Clippers in the first round.
This seemed like as good a time as any to revisit the trade, again, so I tag teamed with Jeffrey Bellone, AKA JB, to hash things out.
Shwinnypooh: Well JB, I rambled on there for a good bit, and I’m pretty beat, so I want to toss it over to you. I know that we have entirely different takes on the deal, so where I would like to start is: does Porzingis’ most recent injury impact how you feel about the trade at all, or is that not part of the equation to you when you evaluate the merits of the deal and the return the Knicks received?
JB: No wonder you’re beat. That was a lot of rambling to get to here. Now it’s my turn.
When evaluating a trade, there are two ways you can look at it, and both are useful exercises for different reasons: first, you can try to put yourself into the shoes of the decision-makers and argue whether the logic was sound at the time of the trade; and later, you can take a more omniscient view to decide who ultimately won the trade.
People often drift between these two perspectives in making their case for or against a move like the Porzingis trade. For example:
Pre-trade logic: I think it was a fair trade to make given KP’s injury history and the prospect of signing multiple superstars the following summer.
Post-trade logic: See, my opinion was right, because, once again, he got injured… or, from the alternative perspective, See, my opinion was right, because the Knicks used their added cap space to sign middling players from the discount bin.
So in answering your question on whether KP’s most recent injury impacts how I feel about whether the Knicks — knowing what they knew at the time — should have made this trade, the answer is no. And let’s stay in the pre-trade logic for this discussion.
The NBA is different than most professional sports leagues, in that you are as good as the best player on your team. Obviously, it takes more than one star player to win. In fact, it takes a lot more. But the ceiling for 95% of NBA teams is dictated by the best player on their roster. For the Knicks, Kristaps Porzingis was that player, which you could argue makes for a low ceiling; but without him, the passageway to contention appears more like a tunnel through a large mountain.
The entire reason you stockpile draft picks and cap space is to acquire players like Kristaps Porzingis. And as the Knicks have learned in countless ways, there is no guarantee that the currency of NBA transactions — trade chips, cap space, market appeal — will be accepted at the point-of-sale for superstar players.
Porzingis was unhappy in New York, he wanted to play somewhere else, and the Knicks didn’t believe he was a max-level player given his injury history and body type. The concerns for a long-term marriage were clear, but that doesn’t mean both sides couldn’t have come to an agreement to forge ahead together. Heck, after Durant’s injury, there were valid concerns for turning your whole roster over and signing him to a max contract.
And we recently learned Durant might have been deciding on the Nets around the same time the Knicks were clearing cap space in preparation of signing him:
“Brooklyn was everything I’m about,” Durant said while talking to JJ Redick on The Old Man and the Three podcast. “Chill, on the low, all black everything, we quiet, just focus on basketball. There’s no show when you come to our games. There’s no Madison Square Mecca, all of that shit. We just going to hoop and build something new over in Brooklyn … I felt that way around February leading up until March [2019], and then once free agency hit, it was time.”
There is an extremely small list of top-tier NBA superstars. There is a somewhat wider list of secondary stars, and the job of general managers is to somehow pluck as many players from those respective lists as possible. Which leads to my question back to you: putting recent injuries aside for a moment, is a healthy Kristaps Porzingis capable of becoming a top 30-40 player in this league?
Shwinnypooh: Regarding Durant’s recent comments: I don’t believe that he knew anything in February, and I’ll leave it at that.
Even at my peak levels of saltiness — for the record, I’ve said multiple times during this season Kristaps is better than Karl Anthony-Towns and the best player from his draft class, although Devin Booker has me looking foolish — in the immediate aftermath of the trade I argued he was capable of being a top-15 player.
Perhaps it would be clearer to argue that I thought an uninjured Kristaps could push for a Second Team All-NBA berth at peak performance, but would likely have a few Third-Team All-NBA selections to his name. He was also a strong contender to be Second-Team All-Defense caliber big, although I’m skeptical of any First-Team or Defensive Player of the Year ceiling.
It’s kind of hard to put injuries aside when talking about Porzingis, though. He had a myriad of lower body injuries even prior to the ACL tear, which were worrisome. Then he tore the ACL in his left knee.
Now he’s torn the meniscus in his right knee. I’m not a doctor, but I imagine an argument could be made that the latter injury is the result of the body compensating for the previous one. I’m not sure how any of it works, but I know this much: this dude is a major fucking injury risk and that part of it seemed to be willfully ignored by many as a non-worthwhile consideration in the aftermath of the deal. It was, or at least should have been, a major piece of evaluating the pre-trade logic.
So what is his trajectory now? There’s still the path where he’s relatively healthy, and becomes Chris Bosh 2.0 to Luka’s ground-bound Euro LeBron, they find a Wade facsimile and we cry forever. It’s on the table! I still absolutely think that, with good health, Kristaps is in that top-15/20 range as a player. But availability is the greatest ability, and it’s his worst. It matters a lot.
As far as the scenario you posited where the Knicks swallowed their pride, held their nose, and handed him a full max last summer, I am positive Porzingis would have gotten over his very serious concerns with management and suddenly re-discovered his joy for being a Knick. Let’s dive into this a bit deeper.
What always fascinates me about the “keeping KP” angle is, in that scenario, we go into last year’s free agency with $31 million in space — just less than a max. Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, they signed a bunch of one-year contracts to roll over space (I think this would be highly unlikely and that they’d have signed long-term deals to build with around KP in that scenario), and they swap draft spots with the Wizards and are picking ninth instead of eighth, because KP makes them better. Assuming all of that and that the cap stays flat at $109 million, they’d enter this summer with around $25 million of cap space.
Let’s say that all comes to pass, but Kristaps similarly suffers a torn meniscus. What is he now worth in trade? How are you building around this player you have maxed for four more years, with far less cap flexibility and draft capital? Is KP added to the existing young core a high-ceiling outfit? Even with Tim Hardaway Jr'.’s contract expiring in 2021, what are we really looking at here?
What I argued at the time of the deal — and still believe — is regardless of how we feel about what the Knicks prioritized, they did extract value from the trade. It wasn’t what you’d traditionally look for in a star transaction, but that’s specifically because of their priorities, which were to clear the decks by getting off the two years, $36 million remaining on THJ’s contract, and the one year, $12 million remaining on Lee’s. Still, they added two firsts to their coffers, and Smith Jr., who at the time was at least a functional, if still bad, NBA player.
The downside of the deal was always that if New York struck out, they had effectively pushed the rebuild back out another two or three years. We’re very much experiencing that downside right now. However, so long as they didn’t then sink that free cap into lengthy deals for middling talent, they would still be able to effectively use the flexibility generated to maneuver long-term.
Am I really crazy, even now, for thinking that the latter scenario, as a total blank slate in many ways, is more appealing than the one where we do have a clear cut talent in place, but one whose injury history makes him a major question mark moving forward and has significantly reduced trade value? Are we sure if the Knicks keep him and he suffered this meniscus injury, that he’d retain high trade value with four years, $130 million left on his contract?
JB: What we are really talking about here is expected value. What is the expected value of Kristaps Porzingis on a multi-year contract given the probability that he remains healthy in relation to the likelihood that he develops into a star player?
And if you are going to trade him, what is the expected value of “starting fresh” and being able to acquire a star player or group of players who match his production?
In my view, with Steve Mills and Scott Perry calling the shots at the time, under one James Dolan, the probability of Porzingis tip-toeing his way into several productive seasons where he offers glimpses of being one of the top 15 players in the league is greater than the probability of New York acquiring another player who can reach that potential given all of the unknowns that surround finding such a player in the draft, free agency, or trade.
So, yes, the Knicks hit the reset button. But this wasn’t a hard reboot. This trade was more of a software upgrade. The Knicks thought Durant and Kyrie would overhaul their entire system, and without that confidence, this trade is never made. Right?! Which brings me back to the comparison of likely outcomes: the expected value of Porzingis, hobbles and all, seems greater to me than the expectation that this Knicks organization can find another healthier Porzingis-type player to lead their roster.
And for all the talk about what it would have cost the Knicks to move Tim Hardaway Jr. or Courtney Lee’s salary in July had they suddenly needed more cap space, we have seen, time and time again, teams create cap space when they need to in order to sign a superstar. And we can’t completely overlook the possibility that they could have still moved Porzingis in a sign-and-trade that summer. It would have given more control to Porzingis in dictating where he wanted to play, but it’s another avenue that would have been available to the Knicks. By trading him in February, they made a move based on information (leading to their confidence about signing free agents) that was surely going to change over time. We saw the entire calculus change once Durant got hurt in June.
To wrap up my point: if you said it was a flip of the coin whether Porzingis reaches his potential while playing in at least 75% of Dallas’ games during the length of his contract, I would say back to you: Are the odds much better that the Knicks use the assets available to them from that trade (which still includes cap space) to find a better player? And as I mentioned earlier, isn’t the secret sauce to building a contender acquiring as many top players as you can from a limited list?
Shwinnypooh:
I 100% agree that they could have moved Lee and THJ at the time if they needed to, but it would have 100% run them a serious cost. Just moving Hardaway Jr. alone would have been pricey:
“There was at least one team that thought they’d get three first round picks for [Tim Hardway Jr.] this summer to open up space for the Knicks to sign max free agents,” said Tim Bontemps on The Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective Podcast.
Now, let’s just say, because Mills and Perry are such top-notch negotiators, they can trim it down to two first round picks, one in 2020 and the other in 2022. The Knicks would have opened up a max slot for Durant plus another $10 million in space to fill out the roster. In this scenario Lee is still hanging on your books and probably on your bench, based on how much playing time he’s seen over the last couple of seasons, collecting a cool $12 million for the pleasure.
If you want to trade him, maybe that costs you another first or — so I’m not arguing in hindsight, as I believed at the time — you could offer up the maximum $5 million of Jimmy D’s cash and a couple of seconds to clear him off. Great, now we have around $22 million in addition to the max slot for Durant. I’m also down assets that would hamper the teams’ ability to upgrade in trade.
We could probably go back-and-forth on the potential scenarios all day, as we currently are, but the point, at least to me, is building with Porzingis was not straightforward, and rife with various obstacles. However, you are correct that the Knicks almost certainly would have been able to garner a more significant asset haul for him in a sign-and-trade in the summer if they had waited, had their starfucking fantasies crushed at the outset of free agency, and then engaged in trade discussions for him.
What I’d also push back on is that while I agree the reason for making the specific trade they settled on is their misguided belief KD and Kyrie were already picking out their lockers at the Garden, they had already decided a divorce from KP and the rest of the Porzingii was necessary. Zach Lowe has reported the Knicks engaged the Sacramento Kings (how have these two teams not made some bonkers trades in the last decade of their collective insanity?) in the build-up to the 2018 draft, months before they had even consummated a deal for Unisnake, in a package centered around De’Aaron Fox. Marc Stein reported in the aftermath of the deal that they had also contacted the Utah Jazz about a trade for Donovan Mitchell.
What we know now is they rolled the dice on landing a couple of Gordon Gekko-level whales with the cap-clearing package they chose, and got snake eyes. Mills paid the price for that, but it seems clear that, free agent star thirst aside, they were planning on moving on from KP. Whether it was reservations over giving him a max contract (which I still believe is the single most important factor in all of this), fretting over his commitment to the franchise, long-term health risk, concerns over his off-court activities and decision making, or some combination of the above, they were moving him, come hell or high water.
Now, what are their odds of recouping value on the deal with what they chose to do? I’m not sure. I’ll admit it isn’t very clear how exactly they land the necessary players from the, as you put it, limited list that exists. Isn’t that OK, though? I’m not arguing the Knicks’ path to salvation is clear, but I do believe they have more optionality now than they would have in the event they kept Porzingis. You might prefer they had focused on maximizing their asset haul, and that’s fair, but what I am contending is that the return they settled on isn’t selling for 50 cents on the dollar as it has been portrayed.
Think I’m just being a homer? Don’t take it from me, then!
Do you find any of this sensible or agreeable, or am I just being a sheep-peasant of common Knicks Twitter?
JB: We are all “common Knicks Twitter” to one person on the birdie app that we all know from our mentions. But I think we can end by agreeing that the Knicks didn’t epically fail in trading Kristaps Porzingis, at least not from a roster-building standpoint.
After years of trading away draft picks, falling back in the lottery, and failing to identify or develop the right players, the fact they somehow ended up with Kristaps Porzingis — a true unicorn, as cliché as it now sounds — and couldn’t find a way to make him at least their second-best player during a competitive window that turned into several playoff runs is, if nothing else, depressing.
That said, he has to be healthy to be the second-best player on your team. And perhaps the unknown of the added draft picks and cap space netted in the trade is a trail worth exploring instead of the relatively known path forward with Porzingis and his injury history.
I think our conversation highlights why it is so difficult to evaluate the Porzingis trade. You can make legitimate arguments for both sides. There are scenarios yet to unfold that could prove one team as the overwhelming winner. But at the time of the trade, still several months away from free agency, with apparently no guarantees from Kevin Durant, it seems like they made the move too soon, depressing his value due to the contracts they needlessly attached in moving him. And that’s why, even if we agree that trading him was eventually the right play, I still believe the trade they made was a bad one (or not as good as it could have been).
