Brown and Thomas Fought the Law, and the Law Won

You might not realize it, since the Knicks stopped playing with any urgency sometime in February, but their season – mercifully for their fans and anyone who appreciates quality basketball – comes to an end this week. The ridiculous debacle of a campaign, one of the team’s all-time worst, can be summed up in a song made famous by the Clash, “I Fought the Law.”It’s not that the Knicks actually took on the NYPD – though the team played so lifelessly at times that it would be hard to favor them in a pickup game against a squad comprised of the city’s finest – but rather that team president Isiah Thomas and Chairman James Dolan fought the accepted laws of statistics and finance, and a miserable season is the result.Let’s look at Thomas first. All of his trades have a common blindness – an inability to project how a player will perform in the near future. After trading for Tim Thomas two years ago (yes, it does seem longer) Isiah said he hoped the Knicks’ coaching and managing would finally turn the weak side forward into the star player many observers thought he would be. Never mind the years of evidence already on the books that Thomas makes a passable reserve forward, but lacks the skills and consistency to be an elite player. Isiah has made the same mistake with each subsequent addition to the Knicks roster.You shouldn’t have to be a stathead to see the value in the accumulated performance records of players, yet Thomas has consistently ignored each of his new acquisitions’ past as if there were some magic dust players find on the floor at Madison Square Garden that transforms them into the reincarnation of the 1972-73 championship team. The feeble efforts of Jerome James, Jalen Rose, Maurice Taylor, Malik Rose, Eddy Curry, and Steve Francis to cohere as a unit was pretty clear evidence that their arrival at the Garden did nothing to alter existing propensities as selfish, turnover prone players with absolutely no interest in playing defense.The most unfortunate thing about this trend is that it firmly indicates that Thomas, left to his own devices, will continue to import overpriced, one-dimensional players. The Knicks’ 39-43 finish in 2004 will almost certainly be the high water mark of the Thomas administration.While Thomas was fighting the laws of probability, Dolan fought the law of the salary cap, and his just desserts are a miserable team that is capped out until 2009.If Dolan persists, the Second Avenue subway may open before the Knicks are competitive again. The salary cap exists to give owners a nominal sense of cost certainty and to prevent rich teams like the Knicks from bludgeoning their smaller-market counterparts – like, oh, say, the San Antonio Spurs – with their payrolls.Instead, the opposite is happening. The Spurs are being smart with their outlays – $15 million in Texas buys you a season of Tim Duncan; in New York City it gets you 82 games of Jalen Rose – using half the Knicks’ payroll to build a champion. Dolan may be the only person associated with the Knicks who still thinks you can spend your way out of salary cap hell.So what now? This will be an interesting off-season for the Knicks, even if it’s not a productive one. Coach Larry Brown may use his health issues, which will force him to miss the end of the season, to jump ship. I’m sure most Knicks fans would like to see Isiah follow. It’s hard to imagine the Brown-Thomas team will stay intact for another season. Brown has repeatedly criticized his players, and Thomas has assembled the roster. Something will have to give, and the smart money would seem to be on both men getting out of town. The truly unfortunate thing is that the talent pool for team executives is remarkably shallow in the NBA. Finding someone who can straighten out this mess would be a miracle.The Knicks will watch Chicago GM Jim Paxson smile early on draft night as he uses the pick Thomas dealt him in the Curry trade last September. The Knicks, meanwhile, won’t go to the podium until the 21st and 29th picks of the first round. They’ll need to maximize the impact of those picks and use their mid-level exception to find a player who plays defense and takes care of the ball.A housecleaning is order, but here’s where the salary cap makes life nearly impossible. The only thing the Knicks will get in a trade for any of their veteran players, even productive ones like Francis or guard Stephon Marbury, is another group of overpaid stiffs whose salaries match. It bears repeating that while the Knicks are over the salary cap, so too are 28 of the NBA’s other 30 teams. It takes two to trade, and there are precious few plausible scenarios that involve any of the Knicks’ high priced veterans leaving town with the Knicks getting value in return.Ultimately, the Knicks will probably spend the summer grabbing at headlines as the team pursues another big name for their team president and/or head coaching job, and for rumored deals sending Marbury or Francis out of town. The best thing would be for the team to do what it said it can’t do: look long term. Someone needs to say that the Knicks tried everything to win quickly and it didn’t work. For the next two years, they will pay the price by waiting out the millstone contracts, adding draft picks and young mid-level signings, and aim to contend in 2009.It might not be such a hard sell. Many Knicks fans had 2007 circled as the year Allan Houston’s contract expired. But trying everything possible to win now has forced that date back two years. It appears the options are to begin building a contender in 2009, or contend in 2011 or 2012 and risk more seasons like this one en route.Neither option is attractive, and it’s clear from the wreckage of this season that adding veterans to try to win now is not a viable choice. The Knicks’ best chance is to master the skill of selling lowered expectations. This could be the optimal time for it, too; after a season like this one, no one expects anything from this team.mjohnson@nysun.com

Brown and Thomas Fought the Law, and the Law Won

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