According to Chris Broussard of ESPN.com, we've pretty much decided that we're accepting the Knicks' offer, now it just comes down to which picks we're getting and the protection the picks will have. I wanted to hold out as long as possible to pass judgment, but now that the moment of reckoning has seemingly arrive, I'd like to kindly ask: what the hell just happened?
We're essentially taking on six million dollars worth of salary in Jared Jeffries' contract to add another power forward, Hill, and get the Knicks' picks two and three years from now. That's right, not this season's pick, when they'll actually have a good one, since they gave that one to the Jazz, but their 2011 and 2012 picks. You know, the 30th pick in the draft thanks to the Lebron-Bosh super-team they're assembling. But in all seriousness, let's say the Knicks "only" get Joe Johnson and Rudy Gay this summer. Doesn't that still make then a top four or five seed in the East? Maybe even higher? So what's the point of going for these picks?
This deal also effectively takes away the few million dollars we might have had to work with over the offseason, so we're essentially returning this team next year, plus Jordan Hill, Jared Jeffries and a [hopefully] healthy Yao Ming. Is that a championship core? I don't think so, but I'd love to be proven wrong.
To be fair, it's only just that we give Morey the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. There were plenty of naysayers after the made the seemingly-baffling Rafer-Lowry deal, and look how that's turned out. Here's hoping he has a little more magic up his deftly-calculating sleeves.
And to continue the defense of our math-loving hero, it's highly possible that Morey realized that we could get nothing out of just letting Mcgrady expire and decided to try and snatch up two extra draft picks (remember, this is the same guy who landed Aaron Brooks and Carl Landry) while he could. Even with Mcgrady coming off the books, we'd have little cap space this summer unless we renounced the rights to both Scola and Lowry, and even that would only give us about twelve million (I'm operating under the assumption that the salary cap will be 52 million next season). So maybe the deal isn't as bad as I originally portrayed it as. But still, I just feel like we could have gotten more for a 23-million-dollar one-year deal months before one of the most highly-anticipated clusterfucks, sorry, free agency periods, ever.
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