Lower East side
NEW YORK – With three outstanding rookies and a Hall of Fame coach known for his teaching skills, the New York Knicks would appear to be in a rebuilding phase with an eye to the future.
For years, the Knicks have attempted (without success) to rebuild on the fly, compromising their future with bad trades and free-agent signings. If ever a team needed to develop a serious plan with a solid foundation, it's the Knicks.
At first glance, a reconstruction would appear to be what team president Isiah Thomas is doing. He has drafted shrewdly in his two years in New York, and he hired Larry Brown, a man who will teach the young players how to play.
But one look at the rest of the roster tells you this is no youth movement. With a $120 million payroll, the Knicks are a hodgepodge of overpaid former stars, out-of-place veterans and eager rookies. Not exactly the blueprint for the development of a young team.
The fact is, New York has 15 players who all are good enough to play, but most of them don't stand out as any better than the rest (except for Stephon Marbury).
If you're Brown, do you play Malik Rose, Antonio Davis or Maurice Taylor? Penny Hardaway or Quentin Richardson? Qyntel Woods or Trevor Ariza? Brown apparently hasn't been able to figure that out either, as he has started 20 different lineups already this season.
The team seems rudderless and on a course that takes its own path each day. One game, a group of players seem to click together, and the next night, the same lineup can't do anything right.
Following an embarrassing blowout loss to Detroit Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, the Knicks found themselves at 13-25 almost halfway through the season, trying desperately to stay in the hunt for an Eastern Conference playoff berth. Granted, there was a glimmer of hope in the form of a six-game winning streak to start the new year. And in Brown's defense, his club has had a number of injuries that have kept him from finding a consistent rotation.
But as the current four-game losing streak has shown, this is not a team that is ready to contend. It is young, very inexperienced and defensively challenged.
The hope, if you're a Knicks fan, lies in the play of the three rookies – Channing Frye, David Lee and Nate Robinson. Each has provided a spark for New York in very different ways.
The 7-foot Frye is a very good jump shooter – the kind of big man who can stretch defenses and open up the floor for driving lanes for his teammates. Lee has already been compared to Bobby Jones by Brown as a defensive dynamo and an athletic ball of energy with a nose for the basketball. And Robinson is a power pack – a 5-9 speedburner who is fearless going to the hoop and a natural born scorer.
All three look like legitimate NBA players – young guys who will learn how to win games as they get older. When they're combined with Eddy Curry, who has the potential to be a dominant low-post presence, the Knicks have the makings of a good team down the road.
The problem for Brown is the rest of the roster. It is loaded with bad contracts and pieces that don't fit the equation.
Jerome James barely gets off the bench. Nor do Rose and Hardaway, who has been inactive much of the season. Taylor and Richardson are bit players who are used to playing big minutes. If all of these players were in the last years of their contracts, it would be one thing, but only Hardaway is in the final season of his deal. The rest are in the middle of long, lucrative pacts – the result of ill-advised trades that have hamstrung New York's salary cap.
None of these players will be happy sitting on the bench for the next few years, but their big contracts make them almost impossible to trade.
The blueprint for a rebuilding project is to have a combination of cap flexibility, a core of young players supported by a great coach and veterans who understand their roles. The Knicks have half of it right – they have some good young talent and a great coach. But there are many questions that hang over New York's team.
How long will Brown actually coach? Will he be there to see the project through? Can Thomas purge the roster of some of his expensive, non-playing veterans in order to clear cap room? Is the handful of impressive youngsters on the roster enough to build a championship team around?
The Knicks do seem to have some sort of future, but at this point it remains cloudy. Even with his talented rookies, Thomas has to develop a more coherent plan. No more taking on bad contracts. No more Jerome James signings. It's time for New York to commit to the future without compromise.
