New York Knicks Point Toward Future Via Latest Trade

Ever since Phil Jackson brought Carmelo Anthony back to the New York Knicks with a near-max, five-year deal this past summer, the plan has been to build around the team’s franchise player next summer and beyond.

Yet nothing Jackson had done — not even trading former Knick starters Tyson Chandler and Raymond Felton last summer — confirmed that notion more than the deal he made on Monday night, as Jackson sent guards Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith to the Cleveland Cavaliers for Louis Amundson, Alex Kirk and a 2019 second-round draft pick, plus Lance Thomas, from the Oklahoma City Thunder.

Before the three latest Knicks even came to New York, Jackson was already planning on ultimately completing the Knicks’ rebuild without them. And he knows that he’ll likely either get little help from, or may eventually trade, the draft pick he received from the Cavaliers.

More from Hoops Habit

But parting with Shumpert and Smith wasn’t about getting fair value in return. Not even close, in that sense. No, it’s all about Anthony, and Jackson’s continued pursuit of trying to slowly but surely build a legitimate Eastern Conference contender around the cornerstone piece that Jackson gave $124 million to secure.

With Jackson’s hands tied, it was a deal that had to be done, to create even more salary cap space than the already large amount he originally planned on having next summer. Yes, that’s just how much help New York now needs to even think of turning things around from the great depth to which it has sunk.

Ideally, the Knicks’ rookie team president would have loved for young players like Shumpert and Cleanthony Early (selected by Jackson in the second round of the 2014 NBA draft) to have remained healthy, and for Tim Hardaway Jr. to learn Jackson’s patented triangle offense and buy in defensively.

Jackson would have been delighted to see Smith go back to the way he played when he earned a Sixth Man of the Year award two seasons ago.

And he’d have been overjoyed to see his other primary acquisition from last summer (besides Anthony), point guard Jose Calderon, return to playing the way he did years ago, when he made a name for himself with the Toronto Raptors.

At best, Jackson hoped this season’s Knicks would become far greater than the sum of its dysfunctional and inadequate parts, and morph into the type of Eastern Conference playoff contender, which through further signings — via trades, or with the money made available by the expiring contracts of Amar’e Stoudemire and Andrea Bargnani next summer — might have eventually completed New York’s rebuild the way Jackson envisioned it when James Dolan hired him.

At worst, is exactly where the Knicks are — a point in Jackson’s tenure in which nothing to date has worked out, to the point where New York has unfathomably been able to count its victories on a single hand, a mere four games from the midpoint of its season.

It’s a point at which Jackson finally had to give in and completely put all of the Knicks’ eggs in next summer’s basket, and likely, into the one which New York hopes will yield something fruitful during the following summer as well.

We all knew it was never about this season, that it was always about next year and beyond, the moment Jackson took the reins and the previously meddlesome Dolan finally agreed to step aside in a manner in which he hadn’t before while working with earlier regimes.

But no one could have guessed it would be this bad — a moment at which the 5-32 Knicks (yes, an NBA-worst FIVE-AND-THIRTY-TWO) have turned into such a laughingstock that Jackson had no other choice but to begrudgingly accept that the future had to start now, long before the already long-awaited summer of 2015.

Home/New York Knicks