There is another way
As it stands, without Irving, three things are almost certain to be true about the 2017-18 New York Knicks: a) they will play hard, b) they will make KP the central focus, and c) they will be very, very bad.
That last part is what scares Knicks fans. Can we afford to subject Porzingis to another season of losing basketball?
The short answer: it depends.
Not all 50-loss seasons are created equal. The Knicks just won 31 games in what was a painful, unwatchable, soul-wrenching siege of a year. The Sixers won 28 and it was the best the franchise has felt about itself in a decade and a half.
Even the 2015-16 Knicks – a 32-win team that struggled but played hard and looked like it had just taken the first step in a slow but steady climb – had KP feeling great about the direction of the franchise right up until Derek Fisher was fired. It’s possible to be bad in a good way.
If the 2017-18 Knicks follow the same path, with Ntilikina showing signs of growing into the player many think he’ll become, the narrative heading into next season will be a positive one. KP will establish himself as a star who can carry a team on his shoulders. The team will play gritty if not pretty basketball. And they will almost certainly add a top-five pick for their troubles.
All of the sudden the future starts looking very bright.
Even if the team merely finishes with 40 or so wins in 2018-19, in addition to max cap space, they will be able to offer a star free agent the opportunity to play with a core of players between the ages of 20 and 27, with the 24 year-old Porzingis as its centerpiece.
There’s even the slim possibility – assuming the Knicks take back short-term money in the inevitable Carmelo Anthony trade – that New York could maneuver into having two max salary slots available. How so? Since they’ll have all of their draft picks, they could package a future first to a team willing to take on Joakim Noah’s then-expiring contract.
Yea, but we’ve been down this road before. Having cap space doesn’t guarantee you anything unless there’s a player who really wants to co-