So the Knicks are 3-9 right now. They're pretty bad, but even with as bad as they are now, they still brought us right to the brink of a loss yesterday.
Basically they're a team that wants to run, they're a team that needs to run, but they're a team that can't quite make it work out to wins.
Steve Nash is signed through 2012, and nearly all of the league's premier point guards are locked up long term.
Henry Abbot over at truehoop has an interesting article today of "who was the more valuable sun?", aka which was more important, D'Antoni's offense or Steve Nash's talent?
Last season was inconclusive for both, but at this juncture ... you have to consider that Nash has the upper hand in that debate. Yes, D'Antoni is a hamstrung by a roster built for free agency in 2010. But if you're keeping score at home, at this point D'Antoni's Knicks are 3-10 and among the NBA's worst, while Nash's Suns have started out a mighty 11-3.
An NBA front office official once made an interesting point to me about this. He says that D'Antoni's free-wheeling, up-and-down system is every bit as brilliant and amazing as anyone ever thought it was. But that style has only ever worked in the NBA when run by a transcendant point guard.
The Suns, right now, have the system (as run by D'Antoni's former assistant Alvin Gentry) and the player, in Nash. And it works.
Despite a lot of enthusiastic talk about Chris Duhon at this time a year ago, D'Antoni's team has the pace, but not that player, and it has been a struggle.
So which player even COULD run the system? Obviously Nash, but you'd have to believe CP3 and a substantially younger Jason Kidd could easily handle it, but those guys are virtually (not even virtually, they ARE) unattainable right now. So if you can't get them, who do you go after if you're NY?
Topic: Hypothetically, who should run SSOL in NY for D'Antoni? (Read 2277 times)