Optimistic, to a Point, About the Knicks’ Big Trade
By MICHAEL POWELLMichael Powell, a business reporter for The Times, occasionally sends City Room dispatches about his beloved, bemoaned Knicks. Here are his thoughts on the Carmelo Anthony acquisition.
O.K, let me acknowledge the obvious. To be a Knicks fan is to wear my worry beads around my neck. So as I was about to go to sleep Sunday, and heard the word that the Knicks have acquired Carmelo Anthony from the Denver Nuggets, my first thought ran fatalistic: How much did the Nuggets extract from the Knicks owner, James L. Dolan, who has made such a spectacular hash of this team since inheriting it from his father?
The answer? More or less our entire young team. Certainly this trade draws down the curtain on the first half of the first hope-filled Knick season since William McKinley was president. (Or at least since the Patrick Ewing-Latrell Sprewell era.) That same curtain will now rise to reveal … a spectacularly talented offensive player, who rebounds well for a small forward, and who draws double-teams, which should help Amar’e Stoudemire, our ruling superstar, assuming that Melo has the good sense to pass him the ball.
Alas, Melo is not always noted for good sense, and he has too infrequently passed the ball in the past.
But I get ahead of myself. Let’s first tiptoe through the wreckage and see what we gave up, beginning with Wilson Chandler. The kid worked hard, he was long so he played better defense than he got credit for, and he blocked shots very well in a team context. But brain-lock could afflict him like a lingering cold, and he was a redundant piece with Melo’s arrival and could be restricted free agent this summer. Which meant the Knicks almost certainly would have let him walk. They need his to save their shekels for a point guard.
Raymond Felton: The little dude was heady and played a gutsy style of hoop. He shot too many threes, although that style is built into the Mike D’Antoni offense. And he showed signs these last two months (as has Amar’e) of wearing down under the relentless D’Antoni minutes. He has penetrated less, and he’s been finishing poorly at the hoop. (In fan-speak, he missed an awful lot of layups). But he’s 26, and the Knicks gave him up for a 34-year-old point guard. Chauncey Billups is a fine player, a champion more than once in the course of a long career, but for what it’s worth, he has never been the pure distributor that Felton was this year. Billups is averaging 5.4 assists; Felton is averaging 9.
On the other hand, Felton’s stats are inflated by playing in D’Antoni’s run-catch-let-it-fly offense, and Billups is a far better three-point shooter — 44 percent to Felton’s 32 percent.
So, for this year, this trade counts as a slight upgrade. But if D’Antoni makes Billups go 40 minutes a game, as he did with Felton, look for one of this elderly point guard’s legs to detach and fall to the court sometime in late March. As well, we will see a lot more of Toney Douglas, who sometimes plays defense like Darrell Walker and most often plays the point like Ray Charles.
Danilo Galllllll-inari: Milano Boy had grit, and a certain hallucinatory confidence; I particularly enjoyed when he would demand a chance to cover, say, Lebron. He as often got torched, if not split in two, but his fire was fun. An All-Star upside may not reside within him, but freed of the pressure of New York, he could turn into a 20-point scorer and a good all around player with the right coaching. Oh, you said George Karl will be his coach, whose golden touch tends toward brass? Mama Mia, demand a trade.
Anthony Randolph: Home boy saw no burn, none, and he has this weird corkscrew motion on his jumper that to my eye suggests he’ll never be truly reliable at 15 to 18 feet. With a build that is waiflike even after a good breakfast, he has his limits as a big man. But this speaks to D’Antoni’s failure as well: His too-tight rotation leaves too much on the bench, and he loses patience with young players. This kid just might have been our Marcus Camby, a Gumby-like shot blocker and board sweeper, in another year.
Timofey Mozgov, or The Mark of James Dolan: This, I assume, was our very own Idiot Prince at his most subliminally idiotic, tossing young pieces of his team out the window of his Long Island palace simply because he can. I will go out on a limb and predict that this kid — again, putting aside the Karl (No Player Shall Improve on My Watch) Factor — will be a top 12 to 15 N.B.A. center. He’s athletic, works hard, blocks shots, and as a rebounder he shows a nose for the ball. In the N.B.A., there aren’t a lot of those. And we just tossed him away.
The sense one got in those final days was of Donnie Walsh, with that Bronx poker face of his, with his cards tightly pressed against his chest. Gallo seemed likely his trump card — hold him back until the very last minute, and then deal. Then Dolan strolls into Los Angeles and gets a case of the giggles and tosses cards out there.
So what we get? To be a Knicks fan is to feel like a Scottish Highlander with ancestral memories of so many losses. For the gray (or no) hairs out there, there’s the Spencer Haywood/Bob McAdoo pairing, which came to ill so quickly. And there’s another point of worry: as the ESPN columnist Bill Simmons pointed out recently, D’Antoni played Amar’e some insane number of minutes over a stretch in December. Since then, his numbers have dipped. It’s like a star pitcher — you don’t burn him out in July.
But look, let me try on optimism, even if it’s an ill-fitting suit for any Knicks fan. We get a major, young, offensive player, who can fill the hoop. Presumably, he’s going to want to prove he can win, which is to say he’s going to want to prove he can pass. Should he and Amar’e co-exist, they could give a migraine to defenders at crunch time. And we held on to Landry Fields, who is one of the savviest young players in the N.B.A.
And, lest we forget, we get back one of Isiah Thomas’ first-round draft picks in the form of Renaldo Balkman, who carries an average of just 2.6 points per game and 0.8 rebounds, but at least gives us one of the N.B.A.’s better hair braids.
The answer? More or less our entire young team. Certainly this trade draws down the curtain on the first half of the first hope-filled Knick season since William McKinley was president. (Or at least since the Patrick Ewing-Latrell Sprewell era.) That same curtain will now rise to reveal … a spectacularly talented offensive player, who rebounds well for a small forward, and who draws double-teams, which should help Amar’e Stoudemire, our ruling superstar, assuming that Melo has the good sense to pass him the ball.
Alas, Melo is not always noted for good sense, and he has too infrequently passed the ball in the past.
But I get ahead of myself. Let’s first tiptoe through the wreckage and see what we gave up, beginning with Wilson Chandler. The kid worked hard, he was long so he played better defense than he got credit for, and he blocked shots very well in a team context. But brain-lock could afflict him like a lingering cold, and he was a redundant piece with Melo’s arrival and could be restricted free agent this summer. Which meant the Knicks almost certainly would have let him walk. They need his to save their shekels for a point guard.
Raymond Felton: The little dude was heady and played a gutsy style of hoop. He shot too many threes, although that style is built into the Mike D’Antoni offense. And he showed signs these last two months (as has Amar’e) of wearing down under the relentless D’Antoni minutes. He has penetrated less, and he’s been finishing poorly at the hoop. (In fan-speak, he missed an awful lot of layups). But he’s 26, and the Knicks gave him up for a 34-year-old point guard. Chauncey Billups is a fine player, a champion more than once in the course of a long career, but for what it’s worth, he has never been the pure distributor that Felton was this year. Billups is averaging 5.4 assists; Felton is averaging 9.
On the other hand, Felton’s stats are inflated by playing in D’Antoni’s run-catch-let-it-fly offense, and Billups is a far better three-point shooter — 44 percent to Felton’s 32 percent.
So, for this year, this trade counts as a slight upgrade. But if D’Antoni makes Billups go 40 minutes a game, as he did with Felton, look for one of this elderly point guard’s legs to detach and fall to the court sometime in late March. As well, we will see a lot more of Toney Douglas, who sometimes plays defense like Darrell Walker and most often plays the point like Ray Charles.
Danilo Galllllll-inari: Milano Boy had grit, and a certain hallucinatory confidence; I particularly enjoyed when he would demand a chance to cover, say, Lebron. He as often got torched, if not split in two, but his fire was fun. An All-Star upside may not reside within him, but freed of the pressure of New York, he could turn into a 20-point scorer and a good all around player with the right coaching. Oh, you said George Karl will be his coach, whose golden touch tends toward brass? Mama Mia, demand a trade.
Anthony Randolph: Home boy saw no burn, none, and he has this weird corkscrew motion on his jumper that to my eye suggests he’ll never be truly reliable at 15 to 18 feet. With a build that is waiflike even after a good breakfast, he has his limits as a big man. But this speaks to D’Antoni’s failure as well: His too-tight rotation leaves too much on the bench, and he loses patience with young players. This kid just might have been our Marcus Camby, a Gumby-like shot blocker and board sweeper, in another year.
Timofey Mozgov, or The Mark of James Dolan: This, I assume, was our very own Idiot Prince at his most subliminally idiotic, tossing young pieces of his team out the window of his Long Island palace simply because he can. I will go out on a limb and predict that this kid — again, putting aside the Karl (No Player Shall Improve on My Watch) Factor — will be a top 12 to 15 N.B.A. center. He’s athletic, works hard, blocks shots, and as a rebounder he shows a nose for the ball. In the N.B.A., there aren’t a lot of those. And we just tossed him away.
The sense one got in those final days was of Donnie Walsh, with that Bronx poker face of his, with his cards tightly pressed against his chest. Gallo seemed likely his trump card — hold him back until the very last minute, and then deal. Then Dolan strolls into Los Angeles and gets a case of the giggles and tosses cards out there.
So what we get? To be a Knicks fan is to feel like a Scottish Highlander with ancestral memories of so many losses. For the gray (or no) hairs out there, there’s the Spencer Haywood/Bob McAdoo pairing, which came to ill so quickly. And there’s another point of worry: as the ESPN columnist Bill Simmons pointed out recently, D’Antoni played Amar’e some insane number of minutes over a stretch in December. Since then, his numbers have dipped. It’s like a star pitcher — you don’t burn him out in July.
But look, let me try on optimism, even if it’s an ill-fitting suit for any Knicks fan. We get a major, young, offensive player, who can fill the hoop. Presumably, he’s going to want to prove he can win, which is to say he’s going to want to prove he can pass. Should he and Amar’e co-exist, they could give a migraine to defenders at crunch time. And we held on to Landry Fields, who is one of the savviest young players in the N.B.A.
And, lest we forget, we get back one of Isiah Thomas’ first-round draft picks in the form of Renaldo Balkman, who carries an average of just 2.6 points per game and 0.8 rebounds, but at least gives us one of the N.B.A.’s better hair braids.
Marie Winn, the author of “Red-Tails in Love: Pale Male’s Story,” responds to readers’ questions. 
