NBA Odds & Ends

Biggest news today is that the Knicks have hired Indiana Pacers CEO Donnie Walsh to try and fix the colossal mess that Isiah Thomas has made of the League's Most Important Franchise. Besides getting one the NBA's best GM's (yes the Pacers suck right now, but before the Brawl at the Palace the Pacers might have been the league's best team, and I seem to remember the team being pretty damn good in the Reggie Miller/Rik Smits Era in the 1990's), according to the story "the Knicks yielded to Walsh's wishes on several key terms regarding authority and autonomy" that they had not given to past GM's like Isiah. While owner Jimmy Dolan, who like Glen Taylor in Minnesota should be held as responsible for his team's disaster as the man he lets run the team, will still probably be far too involved, at least relenting some control to Walsh shows he realizes there's a problem here, and he's going about a different way to fix it than just giving Isiah extensions and expecting different results.

Much has been made already about whether Isiah will stay on as coach, and you know what? It's completely irrelevant. I'm sure Knick fans would like to be rid of Isiah as a way of cleansing the franchise of five years of awful, but NBA head coaches have the least effect on their team's outcome of any professional sport. While they can make minor differences, they're basically glorified baby sitters. I've been saying it for as long as Jer and I have had this website, but the inmates run the asylum in the NBA. If you have good players and leaders, you're going to win a lot. That coach might make the difference in a few key moments, but overall it's about the players on the floor.

So whether Isiah stays or goes as coach is irrelevant: the only thing that matters is that a) he's never allowed to make a personel decision again, and b) Walsh can give them enough cap room in the summer of 2010 to make a run at Lebron, DWade, or Chris Bosh. That's it. Do those two things and they'll be fine. Not that clearing that cap space will be easy, but it can be done. According to hoopshype for the 2010-2011 season the Knicks currently have $27.5 million in guaranteed money committed to Zach Randolph and Jamal Crawford, and have team or qualifying offers totaling $7.75 million available to Renaldo Balkman (keep him), Wilson Chandler (nope), and Mardy Collins (ditto). So that's roughly $36 million against a possible $55 million cap number. That right there is pretty nice, but there's two big issues to add to it: David Lee (who I'd keep) and Nate Robinson (who I wouldn't) will be free agents the summer before, so decisions will have to be made on both. The other much bigger issue is two underachieving players with gigantic player options for the summer of 2010 who would be stupid not to exercise them: Eddy Curry ($17.333 million! MILLION!) and Jared Jeffries ($6.9 MILLION!!!). So those guys would obviously push the Knicks right back into Luxury Tax land if they're still on the roster. So Walsh's big job will be trying to get rid of those two and/or Randolph and/or Crawford or all of the above. Good luck to Walsh, but at least the Knicks finally have the right guy to do it.

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While the sky was falling for the rest of the province as they were watching the Canucks blow their playoff hopes against the Colorado Avalanche, I was watching the Nuggets improve theirs against the Suns. If you're at all interested in pro hoops, the Western Conference playoffs have to make you giddy. It's going to be ridiculously good. However, I STILL believe the league needs to grow some cahones, and seed the playoffs 1-16 regardless of conference. Some of the arguments against this include "people like it the way it is" (if by "people" you mean owners of crappy Eastern Conference teams that have no business being in the playoffs but will get in because there's only three good teams out there), we want to build rivalries (this doesn't make sense to anyone), "look how exciting the Western Conference will be!" (while true it would be even MORE exciting if the nine teams in the west who will win 50 games would all get in), or "This just makes far too much sense." (Ok that's really an argument against it, but I haven't heard a good one to dispel this myself).

A-Hole Stern claims that the league is cyclical, and that when the Jordan Bulls dominated in the 90's the East had better teams. One, I checked wikipedia and this is simply not true. While the Bulls were obviously superior to everyone, the West, in most years of that decade, still had more good teams. And since Jordan's retirement, which was full on 10 YEARS AGO, the West has dominated. It hasn't been close. And if you look at the current rosters, it's not changing anytime soon.

My question to you is: which would you prefer? Under the current system, Dallas, Denver or Golden State will miss the playoffs despite winning 50 games, which by the way, would put them possibly as high as THIRD and no worse than FOURTH in the East (not to mention Portland, who at 2 games above .500 right now could be as high as fifth seed in the East!). Or, if we dared to get crazy and take a chance-take a chance-take a chance-chance we could seed it the following way (we'll give the top team in each conference the top 2 seeds):

1. Boston (59-15) vs. 16. Toronto (38-36)
2. New Orleans (51-22) vs. 15. Washington (38-36)
3. Detroit (53-21) vs. 14. Portland (38-36)
4. San Antonio (52-23) vs. 13. Cleveland (41-33)
5. LA Lakers (50-24) vs. 12. Golden State (45-29)
6. Phoenix (50-25) vs. 11. Denver (46-29)
7. Houston (49-25) vs. 10. Dallas (46-28)
8. Utah (49-26) vs. 9. Orlando (47-28)

Any questions? You're telling me there's not plenty of excitement and intrigue with those matchups? Maybe it's just me, but I just happen to be a big fan of the 16 best teams making the playoffs. Call me crazy.