The team has been trash. AND melo is miserable. And Noah's deal is a fukking albatross, and we gave up the best player, and a low-tier prospect to trade for cap space -- which is now eaten by the horrible deal he signed noah to.
Separate the two. The Noah deal is bad. The trade was a 13 million dollar average Center and a low tier prospect for a big expiring contract and a quality rotation piece (and a second round pick in this deep ass draft). That's not a bad trade. As far as the team being trash...I don't think anybody disagrees. The team was trash when he took over and it was also capped out with 2 out of his first 3 1st round draft picks traded away while the second best player publicly let it be known that he wanted out. This team has had a minimum of 6 players under 25 in each of Phil's years in spite of that. They've gathered more second round picks, turned a second round pick into a quality player, drafted a franchise level prospect and have another shot at a franchise level talent in this draft because of how good the top 10 players are in this one. Dude has brought in vets that haven't worked out but been able to move all of them. Same with every veteran not named Noah on the roster right now; the majority of Knicks contracts on the books right now could probably garner some type of value in return. So from a roster loaded with albatrosses, no picks and Shumpert as the best young player on the roster to majority fair deals, picks in perpetuity and KP/Willy in place over three years isn't awful...not even calling it good here, go re-read the post...just not awful. Now back to Noah
That Noah deal is an iceberg, b. It's an anchor. It's almost 20% of the cap for a guy who can't play anymore. Good teams and GMs don't do shyt like that. Or at least have enough big wins around, that you can drown out the losses.
It's hyperbole to call that contract an iceberg. It's not sinking the ship when the team has around 20 million in cap space despite it and every other contract is movable (assuming Melo waives his clause which seems likely at this point). It's an awful deal just like a bunch of deals that were signed in the frenzy last summer, especially the deals that big men signed. Good teams don't do that, sure; good GM's don't do it, true big mistakes are rare for the better GM's. But since my only case is that Phil hasn't been completely terrible because he's maintained flexibility into the future
Again, that's not a huge complement, it's just saying "the captain hasn't steered us into an iceberg yet" which places him head and shoulders above every Knicks GM since Y2K (we've moved up from piles of crap to dirt).
With 20 million dollars in cap space, a young roster, draft picks going forward including a top ten pick this year guaranteed...that contract is an ugly piece of crap but it's not stopping the direction of the team if Phil does the smart thing and sticks to a rebuild.
