Grading Walsh, Playoff Pity

I have refrained from grading Walsh on his first season in charge of the Knicks but I guess now is as good a time as any.

As a preface, let me say that I have never been a fan or cheerleader for the signing of high-profile, high-priced free agents. In summer after summer, Knicks fans would twist themselves into sports pretzels worrying about signing the Allan Houstons of their dreams. And few ever came. Of those that didn't, they rarely made a difference where they finally did land.

And I feel similarly about cap space. Teams scrimp and save for years to get it so that they can go on a spending spree to overpay one or two over-hyped media sensations of the summer. The media gets a hard-on, the bigger the salary. It is a cycle of starvation to abundance to disappointment and misery that is both predictable, boring, and makes fans familiar with the phenonmenon sometimes feel like Willie Wonka cheerfully pleading with the idiot child, "No, please, don't do that", eyes glimmering and awaiting the inevitable consequence.

So in recent weeks, Knicks bloggers have been debating Walsh's 'grade' and on many boards he gets a middle-class 'B', blub-blub,blub-blub.

Here, at KnicksMecca, he gets a D to D-. He's a pleasure to have in class for sure but this team is no closer to winning ball games today than a year ago, maybe further away.

Why the harsh assessment? Let's start with the fact that the playoffs do not include the Knicks. That's like failing the final exam. It's inexcusable. No free agent signing and pie-in-the-sky predictions of a championship caliber team over the horizon someday is going to erase yet another year of being denied playoff basketball.

Maybe you think I'm being impatient or unfair but I don't think so. There are many routes to building a team. This lottery route has yielded a number of high picks in recent years and yet it is the intermediate picks who have produced the best results. This summer we do the lottery dance yet again. And I, for one, am not proud of that.

Our problem over the years is something I'll call VanGunditis. That is a disrespect for the value of earned lottery picks. Our greatest sin over the years has not been bad trades, lack of cap space, or over-spending. It has been the trading away of lottery picks based on the philosophy that Jeff Van Gundy embraced that is the idea that lottery picks are not worth while investments.

Empirically, the Knicks have given away in trades these valuable assets as though they were window dressing all the while begging for higher draft picks that they would have had more than their share of.

Anyone running the Knicks needs to embrace the philosophy that draft picks will never be added as trade filler except on draft day itself. Period. And the corollary to this idea must be that any trade the Knicks make in acquiring talent be sweetened with a draft pick coming our way.

The general idea is simple. The lottery is a crap shoot for all teams except for those picking a sure thing. The sure things come once or twice a decade. For the Knicks, more picks increases the chances of co-incidentally getting lucky.

Secondly, the value of draft picks is always highest on draft day. Having an additional pick or two on draft day is far more valuable than cap space. Draft day trades, make more players available than at any other time of year because draft picks expand the roster of talent possibilities every team can draw from.

This year and next the Knicks continue to be beggars on draft day.

This dove-tails into another peeve I have with Walsh. Why is Nate still here? I would have been far happier had Nate been traded in February to a team needing a point guard than not. This year's draft follows last year's pattern of having an abundance of high quality point guards entering the league. This reduces Nate's value which, relatively speaking, is as high as it's going to get.

It is dumb-founding that we are entering the draft stuck with an untradable draft day asset such as Robinson with Rubio in play. Robinson should have been traded off for a draft day asset long ago.

It is inconceivable to me that all of the attention is placed on the debate of re-signing Nate. My question is, resign him to do what? If we fail to secure Rubio in the draft then the guy I want signed is Andre Miller, not Nate Robinson. And no, I don't give a shit about "the future". This team has got to get better now because the future has come and gone a lot in the last few years. My motto is "less future, more now".

The Knicks being eliminated from playoff contention is troublesome in more ways than I can count but most significantly it means our players are getting zero exposure to playoff basketball. Players like Eric Gordon are suddenly shining like never before in the spotlight of the playoffs. Wouldn't it be nice to see what Lee and Chandler might do in the same situation? Imagine their value rising going into the summer trading season.

To the rest of the league that is getting an opportunity in the spotlight our players look like chumps. Trade into that headwind over the summer.

Walsh may eventually get the cap space he dreams of and, no doubt, the media will have free agent orgasms over whoever our next multi-millionaire player becomes but I am sick of losing, sick of players who don't have the integrity to play, sick of the whole Knicks train wreck of the last ten years.

Trading talent for sand earns Walsh a D- in my book. That doesn't mean I hate him or want him fired or think he's incompetent. It just means that his experiment in driving toward 2010 is as painful as it is dubious in the present moment. I hope he proves me wrong but the Knicks banners are hanging at half mast here at the mecca mourning the death of another season without the hope of the playoffs.