New York Knicks: On tanking, and whether winning is a bad thing
The New York Knicks might not be as terrible as we thought. Yet some fans are torn over whether this is a good thing for the long term success of the team
The New York Knicks won a game on Sunday night. It was arguably the most exciting moment the Garden’s had in years.
The game had it all: winged demigod Kristaps Porzingis dropping 40, rookie Frank Ntilikina draining a 3 that took Sam Cassell-sized cajones to even take, and the team coming back from 19 down to overtake a Pacers squad that wasn’t going away quietly.
In short, it was the type of night that makes you watch sports.
Yet here’s a tweet I got the next day, presumably from a Knicks fan:
"“Last night’s game was amazing. I was super jacked up, but best case they are a 6-8 seed that goes nowhere. Need to position for future”"
This person doesn’t seem to be enjoying the fact that New York has transitioned from “abhorrently bad” to “maybe they don’t totally suck” in a matter of weeks.
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No, the turnaround probably isn’t for real. The team still has a -2.0 net rating, good enough for 21st in the league, and has scored exactly one less point then their collective opponents. That’s not the point though.
The point is that we’ve arrived at a place where people are not only asking ridiculous questions after their crappy team wins a game, but that the questions aren’t that ridiculous.
Welcome to the NBA in 2017
It’s a place where living wholeheartedly in the moment is akin to taking unwrapped candy from a stranger.
Fans are now not only trained to think like peak Tiger Woods (“second place is just the first loser”), but are believers in the notion that there is only one acceptable path to the desired outcome – the most efficient path – and if you’re deviating from that path, it’s the same as jumping off a cliff.
Take the Knicks. Heading into this season, the path of least resistance was clear: suck. Suck early, suck often. Suck so much that even the lottery gods can’t screw you come April.
Except don’t suck too much. Try while sucking (or suck while trying, if you prefer). Be like last year’s Sixers, who gave effort on defense and took high efficiency shots on offense (just don’t make too many). And for the love of god, DON’T start winning games. Winning games means playing veterans past Christmas which means not unloading future money when the opportunity arises which means 35 wins and no Luca Doncic and noooooooooooo. Just no.
But that’s exactly where we are. Enes Kanter leads the league in offensive rebound rate and hasn’t looked like a complete tire fire on defense. That’s almost enough to convince another team to take on the last year of his not-quite-heinous-but-also-definitely-not-ok contract.
Before the season, that would have been a dream come true for the Knicks brass. Now? They might get ballsy and ask for something decent in return for Kanter or even (gulp) want to keep him around for a while.
That is not how you tank
Nor is burying Willy Hernangomez on the bench, keeping the mildly interesting Mindaugas Kuzminskas in street clothes, or letting Lance Thomas anywhere near the building. Yet all of those things are happening, and they’re contributing to New York’s faster-than-expected start.
On paper, nothing good is coming from any of it. As the present improves, the future suffers. At least that’s what we’ve all been trained to think.
Maybe we’ve all been lead astray.
Pick Your Poison
The logic is simple. Aside from the once-in-a-decade outlier (‘94 Rockets, ‘04 Pistons, ‘11 Mavs), to win an NBA Championship, you need either: two top 10-ish or three top 20-ish players. There are three ways to acquire such talent: the draft, free agency, or trades.
Trading for top 10 talent is hard. Even the league’s most incompetent GM’s (the ears of a dozen or so men just started ringing) know you don’t give up something for nothing. Even getting the better end of a deal, you’re either hurting your team’s depth, giving up future assets, or both.
Signing a marque free agent is also not terribly easy. You can move heaven and earth for years to make room for a particular target, and then poof…the plan goes up in smoke before the clock strikes midnight on July 1. There isn’t a team in the league that hasn’t lost out on a top summer target at least once.
All that’s left is the draft, and it is – theoretically – the option that offers the greatest modicum of control.
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Or so we’ve been lead to believe
Since the NBA went to a weighted draft lottery in 1995, do you know how many teams have won the championship with multiple players selected using their own high lottery picks brought on by a stretch of sustained losing?
The same as the number of open shots Kobe Bryant passed up during his last few seasons in the league: zero.
Go down the list. Look at the championship core of every team. You’ll see that none of them were assembled purely by “earning” several consecutive, or even semi-consecutive, high draft picks.
The Rockets traded Otis Thorpe for Clyde Drexler. The Bulls dealt Will Purdue for Dennis Rodman. Years earlier, they traded the immortal Olden Polynice for the pick used to select Scottie Pippen.
The early Spurs were lead by two former number one picks, but Duncan and Robinson were selected almost a decade apart, and the Spurs had all kinds of success in between. Timmy happened by accident, not as part of the plan. The later Spurs were led by Parker, Ginobili and Kawhi, drafted 28th, 57th, and 15th, respectively.
Kobe was taken 13th and acquired via trade for Vlade Divac, Shaq was signed as a free agent, and Pau Gasol was shipped over from Memphis for what at the time was considered an unimpressive lot.
Boston acquired both Garnett (for a package of young’ns, none of which were lottery picks) and Ray Allen (for the fifth pick in the ’07 Draft) via trade.
The Heat traded a package headlined by Lamar Odom (who was signed as a free agent a year earlier) for Shaq before winning in ’06, and then landed Lebron and Bosh in the coup of 2010. The Warriors picked Klay at 11, Dray at 35, and signed Durant away from OKC.
Most of these teams had one player acquired by a high draft pick – Hakeem, Michael, Robinson, Duncan, Wade, Pierce, and Curry – but they acquired the other key components by other means. Only the Celtics used a second high pick to acquire a second star.
And then there are the 2016 Cavs
They are the only championship team that even remotely supports a multi-season tank argument. They took Kyrie first and then dealt two other number ones (Wiggins and Anthony Bennett) for Kevin Love. Still, the only reason that trade even happened is because LeBron was kind enough to return to his hometown.
Just because it hasn’t happened before though doesn’t mean losing a bunch over several years isn’t a good idea. It just means it hasn’t worked yet.
Which brings us back to the Knicks. Even without the extenuating circumstance of Kristaps’ people putting some not-so-subtle pressure on the organization to prove the circus has finally left town for good, there are other tangible, black and white reasons why fans should be totally cool with, you know…winning a couple games here and there.
The obvious one isn’t so much as reason to shoot for success as it is an argument against the theoretical primary benefit of tanking: the draft is a crapshoot
Yes, as Ben Falk recently explained in his awesome deep dive into the draft scouting process, a higher pick definitely yields a higher chance of landing a stud than a later lottery selection. But the variance is still incredibly high.
Take a look at the NBA’s current leaders in PER, an imperfect statistic but a useful tool for our purposes here. The top ten players went in the following draft slots: 15, 1, 7, 1, 33, 4, 25, 3, 6, and 5. Last year’s top ten MVP vote getters? They were drafted at 4, 3, 15, 1, 60, 7, 1, 15, 1, and 2.
You get the drift. Single digits are good, but not the be-all, end-all. Drafting a Kawhi or a Giannis in the teens (both picked 15th, oddly enough) doesn’t happen all the time, but it isn’t an anomaly.
Still, if your chance of grabbing a stud increases something like 20 to 50% by picking in the top five as opposed to in the bottom of the lottery, why not tilt the odds in your favor?
To answer that, a quick example to bring us home…
Quick: name the NBA team from the last ten years that finished 20 games under .500 and had the following players start games: Brandon Rush, Richard Jefferson, Nate Robinson, Kwame Brown, and Ish Smith. You would think that team would be pretty crappy, huh? You would be right. It sounds like a team that needs at least a couple more years of high draft picks before they considered themselves contenders. It wasn’t.
That team was the 2011-12 Golden State Warriors. They jumped from 20 games under .500 to 13 games over, finishing 47-35. Golden State made it to the second round of the playoffs before bowing out to the eventual West champion Spurs.
They got the benefit of one last top ten pick (Harrison Barnes, drafted seventh) before unexpectedly vaulting from 13th in the West to 6th – precisely the no-man’s land NBA teams are taught to avoid.
The rest, of course, is history
Is there a way to quantify the benefit that the Warriors got from knowing what it felt like to be a real live team that didn’t just barf up games before halftime? To knowing what playoff basketball felt like? Who knows.
What was the value of Steph Curry throwing up 27 footers not in a half-filled arena during a meaningless March game but in Game 5 of a tied series against the most successful organization in the league throwing everything it had his way? Beats me.
There’s no way to answer those questions. There’s also no way to know how history would be different if, after starting off 7-6, Golden State had instead decided to ship off their best veterans in an effort to “get the young guys more time” [read: suck more].
They could have done so rather easily with two guys in particular, one of which was former Knick David Lee. Lee was second on the team in scoring and on his way to an All Star birth. Someone would have bitten, sent back something of moderate value, and the Warriors would have opened up cap space to sign a player more in line with their timeline and style of play.
They did, of course, end up signing that exact player in Andre Iguodala. To get him, they needed to ship off two future first-rounders in order to facilitate the acquisition. If they moved Lee, that wouldn’t have been necessary.
These Knicks may be facing a similar decision to the one Golden State faced with Lee if they keep this up.
As noted above, Kanter may actually fetch something of value, an unfathomable notion just one month ago. Ditto for Mr. Rodney Dangerfield himself, Lance Thomas. Kyle O’Quinn is better than several starting centers in the league, and dirt-cheap. Jarrett Jack of all people would be useful to a few teams.
What the New York Knicks do may dictate whether or not the team can take full advantage of the prime of KP’s career. Or it might not wind up meaning anything. New York still has it in them to do a lot of losing as currently constructed. Either way, there will be no sure way to judge the correctness of whatever way they chose to go.
It’s not a cut and dry decision. Coaches like winning. Players like winning. (Most) fans like wining. It might not make perfect sense, but then again, you know what they say about best-laid plans.
Must Read: NBA: 5 hypothetical trades that make sense
By the way, that other Warrior vet who could have fetched a fair bit of value? It was a backup point guard. No one flashy, but a useful player who finished fourth on the team in points and second in assists. He hit 40% of his shots from deep and was a mentor to young star-in-the-making Steph Curry.
That guy? Jarrett Jack, of course.