Let's get the snap judgement winner/loser stuff out of the way quickly. Houston had all the leverage and extracted a very heavy price from the Knicks for taking on Jeffries' contract -- in the end, the thing that was supposedly causing so much consternation and drama between the parties, the protection of picks, ended up being token protection. Step back from being a Knick fan, and applaud Daryl Morey for exploiting an opportunity and making the most out of it, acquiring quality or at least promising players, and setting up the odds favorably to acquire more assets down the road with useful draft picks.

Qualified applause for Donnie Walsh for doing what he set out to do: clearing every bad contract off the roster since he took the job with the Knicks. In a sense, he really had no choice but to move forward and improve the Knicks' modest chances of getting the kinds of superstars needed to vault them back into relevancy after a horrible decade. Walsh was further boxed into a corner by the moves made by several other teams (Chicago, Washington, Sacramento, Clippers) to open up their own cap space this summer for a max free agent -- suddenly the Knicks needed to offer potential free agents extra incentive to consider joining the team beyond the simplistic appeal of playing in New York. With the possibility of two elite players playing together created by the trade, Walsh accomplished that.

The extra cap space, as I mentioned in my last post, doesn't guarantee anything magical, not even close: it only increases the (still small) probability that one or two of the big three free agents decides to sign with the Knicks. And the potential downside remains very significant. If Lebron James sign with the Knicks, then the Knicks have won -- but that's the lowest probability outcome. Even though I support the general optimism of my colleagues that a direction has been set in place, I have some reservations about some of the underpinnings of that direction, and we need to look at what's been established to date since Walsh got here to understand if the Knicks can get somewhere better, and do so quickly.

The "Plan" That Got the Knicks Here

Mike D'Antoni and Donnie Walsh had a plan to shed the roster of undesirable contracts over a two year period in preparation for this summer's free agent extravaganza, while fielding a team (and building a culture) that could gradually establish a higher standard of basketball in New York after so much desultory play and unnecessary drama the last ten years. Walsh's hiring of D'Antoni as the coach was an outstanding choice: as much as any future free agent signing, the coach was going to be a big part of making the Knicks entertaining and relevant again.

Walsh didn't set out to hire a great coach and then put him in cold storage for two years while he gutted the team: there has always been the intent to build something, a core. What everyone didn't foresee was how narrow the margin for error would be, in trying to field a team with playoff aspirations while shipping out mercenaries, and replacing them with mercenaries with 2010-friendly contracts. Not to mention managing a cap situation that became more and more of a tightrope walk, as the economy reduced flexibility in moving bad contracts and acquiring players that could be useful in the short term.

If all had gone well, D'Antoni would now be coaching a team fighting for the 8th seed, with two solid contributing young players from the drafts of 2008 and 2009, and a well-rounded enough lineup that a star player (or two) could easily imagine joining and taking the team to the next level. But bad luck with the draft torpedoed that plan -- Danilo Gallinari got Tractor Traylored and lost a year, while the Knicks just missed out on the perfect guard (Stephen Curry) in the 2009 draft that would have been a major foundational building block of the next great D'Antoni team, arguably as important as any free agent acquisition short of Lebron this summer.

The snapshot judgement of the last draft for the Knicks (especially in light of this trade) has been to highlight the drafting of Jordan Hill as one more Knick blunder born of a dysfunctional culture that hasn't been completely excised. But though I questioned the drafting of Hill at the time, my issue looking back hasn't been that specific draft pick (especially since the alternative everyone like to scream about, Brandon Jennings, didn't dispel concerns about his shooting and maturity adequately enough to enter the picture at the Knicks' draft position) . My issue has been with the overall backup plan when the primary option (drafting the PG of the future, whether that was Curry or Rubio or someone else) didn't materialize. Drafting Hill was defensible on its own merits, but the inability to produce anything more by the end of last summer meant no guard depth, and no leadership brought in (in the form of cheap veterans like Grant Hill) that could get this year's team to the next level, however modest.

The Knicks maintained their cap space, but the team they've actually fielded on the floor this season has been problematic. Building a strong culture and demanding accountability can only do so much with players in the last year of their contracts feeling expendable. The flaring up of sensitive egos (and their agents) demanding better "communication" from the coach, in retrospect, was depressingly predictable.

The Importance of the Backup Plan in 2010

it's easy to say now that it was never realistic to field a highly competitive team while clearing cap space, and D'Antoni could do nothing more than get his motley crew to play hard, develop the young talent worth developing, and try not to go mad in the process. Walsh's big trade yesterday may mean "mission accomplished" in getting the Knicks ready to go for summer 2010, but two key components of the package being sold to free agents, the marquee coach and the young core of the team, aren't in the kind of shape that the brain trust envisioned when the plan was drawn up in 2008. The coach is clearly worn down by all the losing, and the young core is thinner than one would have hoped.

So now it's all or nothing in going for the prize. A popular (and very reasonable) line of thinking has it that the best and most sustainable kind of rebuilding -- forged by the Prestis and Pritchards of the world -- requires a more gradual approach over a period of several years. That the Knicks maybe should have not done this kind of trade, but instead get the best free agent they could with space for one max player this summer, then acquire another free agent after the Curry and Jeffries contracts came off the books in 2011, all the while building around these acquisitions with shrewd trades and draft picks informed by sophisticated player evaluation.

But too much damage was done by previous regimes (and unspeakable individuals) to make such an approach feasible (no draft pick this year, enough said). And let's get to the elephant in the room: the original marquee acquisition, the coach. D'Antoni is getting paid well, but like any individual in the upper echelon of his profession, he doesn't have the patience to see his prime years expended on a laborious rebuilding process. Whatever you think of his abilities as a coach and what he's been able to do with a lot of flawed pieces, you have to respect that he wants to win, and that he feels losing is a terrible teacher. He's been perfect for New York that way, requiring good to great players who are coachable and "get it".

I sure hope Lebron isn't going to be the only player that can make him happy, because that's a lottery ticket with absurdly long odds. If it really comes down to "Lebron or bust", Madison Square Garden may not be the best place for basketball in the years to come. Lebron is one of my favorite players in the league, and what team out there wouldn't want to have him? I even respect the line of thinking from some intelligent colleagues that Walsh and others understand something about Lebron's intentions that fans may not be privy to, that may make his acquisition less of a long shot than it may first seem.

But it's still a long shot, and groveling for the leagues' best player -- as nice a dream as it is -- has never struck me as any better a plan than what was done for much of the last decade. The mainstream media is going to take a straight "Lebron or bust" angle for the next few months, and it's going to be painful to deal with, frankly. (131 DAYS, 4 HOURS, 57 MINUTES, 5 SECONDS LEFT OMG). Screw it. I'm going to judge this trade on how well the skeletal core can be improved by the acquisition of any combination of two players (two superstars, one superstar/one 2nd tier player, etc), so that it can be a 45 to 50 win playoff team the next two years -- and how functional a group of players can be assembled around the free agent acquisitions.

I'll spend time in future posts dealing with the specific possibilities, and of course there's plenty of short term entertainment to look forward to with Tracy McGrady and Sergio playing at the Garden starting this Saturday. I am really, really hoping that Walsh and Co. will do everything they can to be creative with the possibilities created by cap space, and look beyond the superstars to the available players that can be acquired more affordably to build a competitive team.

I'm uncomfortable at how narrow a window for success the Knicks have created for themselves, especially with so many other teams lining up to overpay for 2nd tier talents if the superstars don't budge from their current teams. But there's no choice but to support the current plan, even if grudgingly, and trust that while the big prize is obvious, formulating a credible series of backup plans is going to be crucial for the franchise's long term ascent.