It all seems like a done deal at this point. And I’m not talking about the rumors of Larry Brown being bought out of the remaining four years of his contract for $44 million turning into actual fact. If you followed the Knicks, it was almost an inevitability like a Grant Hill injury. No, I’m talking about something else, something every Knicks fan knows and I hope doesn’t pay for anymore.
The front office is as shaky as Trina’s (ahem) in one of her videos.
Seriously, with all of the mistakes the front office committed, (Jerome James anyone?), Larry Brown is going to be the fall guy? I’ve even heard that one of the reasons why the front office is thinking about letting Brown go is because they can’t meet the personnel demands of Brown, such as getting a shot-blocker. Seriously, James was supposed to fulfill this role, but couldn’t do a lick to earn more than 9.2 minutes per game. Some may say that Brown didn’t establish a rotation, which was a problem and I wouldn’t disagree, but seriously, no one was doing what they needed to do night-in and night-out to earn the playing time besides Jamal Crawford (no, that isn’t a long typo) and Channing Frye before he got injured.
But, when you’re given lemons, you either make try to make lemonade OR, apparrently, have your dad take your pitcher of water and gallon of ice taken away from you.
Anyway, let’s get back to personnel moves. A shotblocker… do the Knicks need one? BIG-TIME. Consider that not ONE Knick averaged over 0.8 rejects per contest and as a team averaged 3.3 blocks per night and it seems like a good idea to create a defensive presence down low and intimidate offensive players to come down into the box. Man, I miss the days of Patrick Ewing. Man, I’d even take back Joe Meriweather who averaged 1.8 stuffs in his only full season as a Knick in the 1979-1980 season!
I think the Jerome James deal has been talked to death… in fact, to boredom. How much is his contract worth, anyway? Well, whatever the number is, it’s not bad for a one-week audition during the playoffs with the Seattle Supersonics. Seriously, he got paid for showing up and actually doing his job for a WHOLE WEEK during the 2004-2005 NBA playoffs!!! I wonder if that would work at my place of employment. Only if Isaiah Thomas was my CEO.
And did they really need Steve Francis? He’s a Stephon Marbury clone - a point guard that not only needs the ball in his hands all the time, but needs to shoot a very fair amount of time as well. Check out something I had written before about this.
