Foolish offer sheet destroys any hope for a professional rebuild
HERE’S the thing:
The Knicks actually had built for themselves a safe place that is rare in professional sports, rarer still in the NBA, and all but impossible to achieve when you are talking about basketball fans in New York City.
They finally had been freed from the basketball tyrannies of Phil Jackson, paroled from his triangular worldview, spared any further attempts by him to shape the roster into whatever mystical and inexplicable foundation he was seeking. They had sent a warning flare out across the sky: we are rebooting. We are rebuilding. We are taking the long view.
And Knicks fans believed them.
Which is, as always, the most dangerous place to be as a Knicks fan.
That’s what makes the signing of Tim Hardaway Jr. so egregious. Knicks fans, almost uniformly, were prepared to swallow the medicine that will come with a complete and profound rebuilding process. If that was the tariff for getting rid of Jackson? They’d pay it. They’d watch Kristaps Porzingis and Willy Hernangomez get another year under their belts. They’d grind their way through another 20-62 with an eye on another lottery.
It was a perfect storm, really. For at least another year, the Cavaliers probably will rule the East, and the Celtics are a simmering power, and over in the other con- ference the Warriors are pretty set to chase championships for at least another three or four years. That isn’t concession, that’s reality. And so it seemed the Knicks had sold themselves, and their constituents, that at a minimum, that’s how long this rebuilding will take. A couple of years. Why go with half-measures when you have a zero percent chance in the short term of winning anything significant?
So James Dolan’s duties were simple:
1. Hire a trustworthy basketball guy. 2. Let him hire a trustworthy head coach. 3. Introduce a trustworthy “process.”
Under none of those headings did “Sign Tim Hardaway Jr. to a contract roughly 75 percent higher than his present team is likely willing to go to retain him” fall. Under none of those headings did “squander as much salary-cap space (and much of the fans’ goodwill) for a Bminus player (and a D-minus defender)” appear.
Place no blame on poor Hardaway, by the way: All he did was sign an offer sheet that, at first, had to seem like science fiction. If someone offers you $71 million, there is only one thing to do: sign on the line which is dotted. This is all on the Knicks, and on their interim-in-chief, Steve Mills (and, by extension, Dolan).
This isn’t just short-sighted, it’s egregious.
And if Mills thought it would be a grandiose gesture on the way toward getting the gig as Knicks president … well, he just may be right. This just may impress Dolan. What’s certain is, Mills wasn’t going to establish his credentials for the gig by doing nothing. Spending three years as an affable counterbalance to Jackson? That probably
wasn’t going to carry the day. Will this? Should this? It wasn’t just that the knee-jerk reaction of so many Knicks fans was to hate this deal; that was the reaction hours and hours later, too. One wise guy noted on Twitter than this would be an awful deal even if the offer-sheet language guaranteed Hardaway 71 million Yen (at least folks can still laugh).
Put it this way: This became a dreadfully unpopular idea even faster than Joakim Noah’s deal did a year ago. And that was detested before Noah even uncapped the pen to sign his name.
The question we keep going back to is this: Why? Why Hardaway? Why now? Why for that much money, when the Knicks already clearly decided they were going to try the full tuck position — with the full consent of the people who pay their bills? And this: Say Hardaway defies his doubters and has a spectacular year. What does that make the Knicks, a 28-win team? Thirty-two? That’s counterproductive to what they clearly wish to be. That’s misanthropic mediocrity. But, then, maybe the shame is on us, all over again. We’re the ones who allowed ourselves to maybe believe there would be a basketball guy in place to run this operation sooner rather than later, that the Knicks would try to hire a competent head of the basketball business for a change. What’s the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me again and again and again, for 17 mostly uninterrupted years of pitiable failure?
Yep. Shame on us.