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Are the Knicks really 'in play' for Kevin Durant?
The New York Knicks are terrible this year, aswe'vecoveredquite a bit. Recent surprising and perhaps ill-advised winning ways aside, the 'Bockers will spend the balance of this campaign continuing their slide to the bottom of the standings with hopes of rising to the top of the 2015 draft lottery, where Phil Jackson and company hope to land a franchise-changing future star to pair with a hopefully healthy Carmelo Anthony and whichever free agents they land with their boatlods of salary cap space to form the next competitive iteration of the boys in orange and blue.There's a lot of hoping going on, as tends to be the way of things when you're 9-37.
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Given existing commitments and a projected 2015-16 salary cap figure of $66.5 million — which could rise if the NBA and National Basketball Player's Association come to an agreement on a so-called "cap smoothing" plan that would gradually phase in revenues from the league's new nine-year, $24 billion broadcast rights deal, which is set to kick in for the 2016-17 campaign — New York looks poised to be sitting on somewhere around $30 million in cap space this summer. Depending on how high the cap line rises ($78 million? $82 million? $90 million) and how the Knicks elect to fill out their roster for the season ahead, they could be looking at even more space in the summer of '16-'17 ... when, as you might have heard, a pretty high-profile free agent hits the market.
Frank Isola of the New York Daily News says the Knicks "are in play" for the services of one Kevin Durant, whose toe injury kept him sidelined for the Oklahoma City Thunder's Wednesday loss at Madison Square Garden, because, we guess, hope springs eternal:
“No question about it,” says a person close to Durant. “Kevin loves Carmelo (Anthony). It could work in New York. But never rule out the Thunder.” [...]
OKC entered Wednesday’s game against the Knicks sitting in 10th place in the mighty Western Conference and with a date against Memphis on Saturday. Durant, who is expected to play against the Grizzlies, spent part of Wednesday’s pregame chatting with Anthony on the court. He is close to Derek Fisher, his former teammate, and admires Knicks executives Steve Mills and Allan Houston.
Is that enough to get Durant to New York? The Lakers will have cap space, Dallas is a perennial contender and Washington is home.
But at least the Knicks are in the game, which is more than we can say about the current team on most nights.
This is, of course, to be expected. Durant will be the best player on the market when he hits free agency in two summers, and every team with enough cap space to offer him a maximum salaried contract will be foaming at the mouth to do so. Free, open, relentless speculation about Durant's next destination — and, perhaps just as importantly, scrutiny of how the Thunder brass work to make sure that it's Oklahoma City — has been flying for a while now, with most of the attention focusing on Washington, D.C.
The 2013-14 NBA Most Valuable Player's every move — launching his new signature sneaker in D.C., defending LeBron James' right to exercise his early termination option in free agency (and thus, by extension, theoretically defending his own right to eventually seek greener pastures should he so choose), his returns to the DMV for family reunions or to play at the Goodman League, etc. — has been pored over in the nation's capital. So, too, have the Wizards' own moves, like hiring Durant's former high school coach this past offseason and having his alma mater's middle school play at halftime of KD's recent D.C. homecoming game.
The prospect of Durant joining the Washington Wizards in the summer of '16 to team with All-Star floor general John Wall and rising sniper Bradley Beal to bring D.C. its first championship since 1978 has arguably become a bigger story than the fact that the Wizards as presently constituted are actually pretty damn good. And it's not just the Wizards and their fans who are courting KD. Recall, if you will, Drake exhorting fans at OVO Fest to convince Durant to join the Toronto Raptors (for which the Raptors were fined), and Raptors guard/Durant buddy Greivis Vasquez openly talking about how great it would be to get KD to T-Dot.
The other teams Isola mentions — the Los Angeles Lakers and Dallas Mavericks — haven't yet been linked to such open all-in moves to curry KD's favor, but, again, we're talking about Kevin Durant here. When the time comes, every team with the money to spend will at least try to get a meeting, to get an audience, to make a pitch and a play for an in-his-prime scoring machine the likes of which the NBA has rarely ever seen.
The Knicks will likely be one of those teams, and while Durant doesn't necessarily seem like the kind of player likely to be swayed by the glitz, glamour, increased marketing opportunities and ramped-up forever megawatt fame that markets like L.A. and N.Y.C. offer — I mean, he's gotten pretty freakin' famous spending the bulk of his career in Oklahoma — Jackson, Mills, Fisher and company will certainly do whatever's in their power to put themselves in position to make their case. (Provided, of course, they're all still with the organization in two summers.) It would be irresponsible team-building not to at least try.
Here's the thing, though: the Knicks are just four and a half years removed from going down this precise road. They didn't reach their destination.
Then-boss Donnie Walsh spent years jettisoning unwanted salaries, recouping assets and trying to identify young/inexpensive contributors to be able to have clean books, plenty of money and an intriguing enough supporting cast with which to lure LeBron James, Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade and the rest of the glittering free agent class of 2010. When the top options elected instead to join up and head south, the Knicks ended up with $100 million worth of Amar'e Stoudemire's explosive game, uninsurable knees and retina-protecting goggles.
That worked out pretty well for a little while, as STAT teamed with former Phoenix Suns head coach Mike D'Antoni, briefly resurgent point guard Raymond Felton, Italian shooter Danilo Gallinari and a cast of lightly regarded contributors (second-round pick Landry Fields, raw Russian center Timofey Mozgov, illustrated man Wilson Chandler, et al) to pick-and-roll their way to a 28-26 mark at the All-Star break. Then, of course, came the rebuild-betraying 'Melo trade, which shipped out a heap of assets, locked in a max-level contract extension that sandblasted the Knicks' salary structure, and essentially put the Knicks on a higher-class version of the same sort of franchise trajectory that they'd traveled before Walsh's teardown. It led the Knicks to the second round of the playoffs, which marked the franchise's most successful season in 13 years, but that's all, and things went south from there.
Jackson was brought in last year, to some extent, to do what Walsh did before him — to clear out bad money, to make New York's roster and balance sheet a bit leaner, to overhaul a culture that had grown toxic and to put the Knicks back on a path to contention. It probably wasn't initially intended to be a full-scale rebuild — if it was, Phil probably wouldn't have given an aging 'Melo $124 million over five years — but it is. And so out went Felton, Tyson Chandler, J.R. Smith, Iman Shumpert and Samuel Dalembert, and in come minimum-salary 10-day guys like Langston Galloway, Lou Amundson and Lance Thomas, and all of a sudden, the Knicks' future consists of 'Melo, two more years of Jose Calderon, a handful of rookie-contract options (Tim Hardaway Jr., Quincy Acy, Travis Wear, Cleanthony Early, Galloway) that they can pick up or let lapse, and a bunch of money that they can spend on new players.
But 'Melo will be 32 when Durant hits the market, with well over 35,000 total pro minutes on wheels that are starting to seem like shaky bets. This summer's lottery pick is anything but a sure thing, New York's draft future has been strip-mined by a slew of ill-fated past deals, and there's nothing else yet in the cupboard. Given the lack of success that the Knicks have had convincing top-flight free agents to take their bags of loot over the years, it's difficult to imagine Durant being one of those "new players" on whom the Knicks get to spend.
While we're not doubting how plugged in Isola is to the Knicks' thinking, this is a lone source close to Durant saying "could" without considering the likelihood of Durant having a raft of higher-class options with more competitive track records from which to choose in free agency ... including, lest we forget, staying in Oklahoma City, where he can sign for an additional year with higher annual pay raises on his max deal. It should, y'know, be treated as such, with an appropriate amount of salt shaken out in its consideration.
Maybe Durant's growing weary of Oklahoma City's ownership electing not to spend top dollar and exceed the luxury tax to retain talent and give the Thunder the best possible chance to win a championship. Maybe he is, as Isola suggests, beginning to grow weary of running buddy and catalyst Russell Westbrook (although every time this has been suggested in the past, Durant has instantly balked at the insinuation and reaffirmed his love for the explosive guard). Maybe he secretly longs for a more imaginative and expansive offense than the one Scott Brooks runs. Even if all those things are true, though, it's hard to see Durant looking at his options — which, again, should be just about every team in the league — and deciding that the Knicks are the most attractive one on the table.
New York might be "in the game" for Durant's services in two summers' time. Barring major improvements to the roster in the interim, though, it's hard to see them staying in it past the opening moments.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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