New York Knicks: Making sense of the Leon Rose hire

Rose’s hiring is concerning

The decision to bring Rose on as president caused some uneasiness because he has never had any front office experience with an NBA team. Even though hiring agents as executives is a trend that is growing throughout the league, it was expected that the New York Knicks would use their upcoming offseason to conduct due diligence to pick the next team president, rather making what seems to be an impulsive move. Especially since this team has been in “disarray” for so many years (another Clyde Fraizer-ism for all of you).

Below is what Jerry Colangelo has to say about the agent to an executive hiring trend:

"“The flavor of the month, the flavor of the year right now is this new prototype,’’ Colangelo said of hiring agents. “There was just a time it was young techies. Now we’ve gone to another. It’s like style of play. Somebody starts winning with shooting 3’s and running up and down the court and all of a sudden everybody copies that because of success. You follow success. There’s been some success stories with this new model. So that’s the flavor of the month. There will be a new one. I don’t know when.”"

In other words, people tend to follow success and then there are some success stories that follow the same model. However, it is not guaranteed that Rose will be successful as the Knicks team president, but it is understandable why Dolan would go this route.

Current prospering teams that have hired former agents as general managers are the Golden State Warriors with Bob Myers, and the Los Angeles Lakers with Rob Pelinka. But as Marc Berman notes, the agent-to-executive route did not bode well with teams like the Pheonix Suns, who hired Lon Babby, or the Detroit Pistons, who employed Arn Tellem.

In the past, the Knicks have made big hires (Isaiah Thomas, Phil Jackson) to attract superstar free agents and have failed to deliver on that strategy. A major concern about Rose is that he would look to prioritize his former clients, rather than conducting the proper research to acquire the right players to create a championship-winning team. And recently, Paul and Anthony have been rumored to be coming back to the Knicks because of their affiliation with Rose.

CAA was the same agency that orchestrated the Anthony and the Andrea Bargnani trades to the New York Knicks. The memory of those deals probably causes Knicks fans’ spines to shiver. Both of these deals caused the Knicks to lose a lot of draft picks, which ended up inhibiting the Knicks’ ability to draft young players that could have played a major role as a supporting cast. At the end of those deals, the Knicks had nothing to show for it but subpar seasons (excluding the 2012-13 season, which I miss dearly).

CAA was also responsible for creating the Miami Heat “Big 3,” which included James, Wade, and Chris Bosh. With the Big Three, the Heat were very successful for those four years, especially by winning two championships in back-to-back seasons. Once James left, the team failed to make the playoffs that year and struggled with consistently being in the playoffs every year. It was nowhere near the Knicks debacle after Anthony and Bargnani trades, but the Heat did go through phases of having to sign above-average talent while trying to draft wisely with their limited draft options.

During those business moves, it was clear that CAA was pursuing their clients’ best interest, more so than that of the teams’. But there should be some assurance that Rose would utilize the skill set of representing his clients and apply it to operating the Knicks, with the Knicks being the client in this role. But if we were to view the New York Knicks as one of Rose’s clients, we might have more confidence in his skills given his history attracting and retaining top talent while putting their best interests first.