Forgot to say, with all that crap, I'm not sure how many more picks the Knicks are willing to give up, especially considering they got raped by the Suns again this season.
If in your opinion the Knicks would rather have Mutumbo and Harrington at C over Cato we'll have to agree to disagree. Mutombo is almost ancient, Cato fits Isiah's mold of re-making the Knicks to resemble the Bad Boy Pistons, and since the Knicks are years away from having any cap space the MLE will not get them a better center. Sorry, but I would never leave Cato or Taylor unprotected. Too big a risk and you need one of their contracts to have any teeth in a trade using the trade exception. And the trading begins after the expansion draft so you don't know which of the two would be wanted by potential trade partners. I didn't say Boki would be the next Peja. But if you keep Weatherspoon and AGriff instead of him, you will never know. And all it costs you is $1.5m. IMO, it is clearly the most prudent financial decision. That's enough upside for me!
Pretty much a no-brainer. With 3 FAs, we need only to expose two guys. Spoon won't be picked because he's an overpaid unproductive player. Griffin might be picked, but he's not doing anything for us anyway. All the other eight players have some value to us basketballwise. One strange thought: How about leaving Francis out? Get him off the book and use that money to sign Kobe.
Very, very, very, very bad financial move. We have $51m committed for 2004-05. Eliminating Francis's $11m does not get you into the Kobe sweepstakes as you only go under the cap by ~$3m. Going under the cap means no MLE and knocks down the trade exception on a dollar for dollar basis. No MLE and only a $3.5m TE is not how I want to approach the July trade/FA sessions.
I'm not arguing that Cato or Taylor wouldn't be an improvement to the Knicks compared to Deke and Harrington. What I'm saying is that they do not necessarily want to take on extra salary. I knew the Knicks situation was bad, but I didn't know just how bad until I actually sad down and thought about it. I just thought they were T-Wolves bad (around I guess 70 million) instead of 94 million bad. Even in a city like NYC, that can't sit well with the owner. In short, there's no easy solution to their problem (not that we care) and in a sense I agree with what you're saying. But a team with Houston, KVH, Marbury and Penny earning 65 mil ain't gonna winning the championship (I won't even go into Shandon Anderson). They need to not only rebuild, but start from scratch. Deke and Othella comes off after next season (I think, you might want to check on that), they'll shed about 16 mil. Then if they can get Utah (according to j*zz fans, they'll have about 6 mil in contracts in 2005/06) to take Penny or KVH's expiring contracts for picks, they're in as good financial positions as they can possibly hope. But enough about the Knicks. I'm not saying Mo and Kelvin don't have value, just that they are a little too expensive for their value. What I'm saying is protect one of them (I'm leaning towards Mo) and see if the Bobcats pick up the other.
Gater, just shows how ignorant I am on contract talks. That's why this board needs guys like you to clear up things like that. Anyways, I was kinda joking in light of all the Francis bashing on the other thread.
8 player? We only need 4! Protect: Yao, Cat, Jackson, MoT(if we can get him into a cheaper contract). And let SF destory the Bobcats.
