Free Agent Profile: All the Knicks’ free agents
The Knicks have made the decisions on their team options, and almost every player from last summer’s free agent signings was cut. But that doesn’t mean some might not come back! Miranda and Alex examine the Knicks’ own free agents before free agency begins.
Miranda: In the Seinfeld episode “The Serenity Now,” Jerry, able to access emotions for the first time in his life, proposes to long-time platonic friend Elaine.
What he says at the end of the clip — “...all the while, the real to secret to happiness has been right in front of us” — may or may not apply to finding life and love. But it does seem to carry weight as far as NBA success. Look no further than this year’s NBA final four. Of the eight Celtics that took the court against Miami, six have only ever played for Boston; for Miami, that number was five out of 10. Eight of Denver’s top-10 minutemen spent most of their professional years in the Mile High City. Los Angeles is the exception: of their 10 players to suit up vs. Denver, only Kyle Kuzma and Alex Caruso have always or even mostly been Lakers.
Does that mean if the Knicks hold on to Bobby Portis, Wayne Ellington, Moe Harkless, and company that you can start making plans for a 2022 ticker tape parade? Unlikely. There used to be a stat in the NFL that teams who run the ball 30-plus times a game usually win. That doesn’t mean you just can just hand it off your first 30 plays and expect the W. Numbers are always backed by context: teams who are winning late often run to eat up clock; that’s why that relationship exists. The Celtics drafted Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Ditto the Heat with Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro, the Nuggets with Nikola Jokić and Jamal Murray. Continuity is related to success, though not exclusively causal.
Knick fans are def down with O.P.P. — other people’s players. Here at The Strickland, we’ve spent months writing about the potential free agent imports. But what if the secret to happiness has been right in front of us all along? What about the Knicks’ own free agents: Portis, Ellington, Harkless, Taj Gibson, Damyean Dotson, Elfrid Payton, and Reggie Bullock? The options were figured out yesterday, and we could be getting some answers soon. Who should stay? Who should go? What are your thoughts, Alex?
Wolfe: Well, I think the first thing we should do here is introduce the situations of some of these guys and try to parse out who’s almost definitely not coming back for another tour in the orange and blue. Let’s keep some of these discussions as brief as they need to be:
Wayne Ellington: He had a partial guarantee on the second year of his two-year, $16 million contract worth $1 million, which the Knicks bought him out of. What did Ellington do in the first year of his deal? Not much, how ’bout you? No, seriously, he didn’t do much — 5.1 points on .351/.350/.846 shooting splits from the guy who was supposed to be the veteran 3-and-D presence that the Knicks have been after for years. To top it off, he got hot following the trade deadline — shooting .397/.417/1.000 over his final 12 games of the season — right after being useless for the better part of the year, and tanking any chance of the Knicks getting a mini version of the haul they got for Marcus Morris for him from some shooting-needy playoff team. Purely out of spite, I hope he never dons a Knick uniform again. Chances are, he won’t.
Bobby Portis: Ah, yes, The Underdog, so he calls himself. I actually don’t totally hate the season that Portis had. He started off as a hopeless chucker, albeit one that could win you a game if he got hot enough.
He actually got better as the year went on, particularly down the stretch, where he looked like the best front court partner for Mitchell Robinson that the Knicks had on the roster. Still, I don’t think he’s going to be back with the Knicks. He didn’t have his second-year team option picked up for $15 million, because he pretty soundly proved he’s not worth that amount this season. So then the question becomes, would Leon Rose and new head coach Tom Thibodeau be attracted to a big who’s occasionally great on offense, and rarely passable on defense? I feel like the answer is pretty soundly “no,” though SNY’s Ian Begley did note that there could be some interest in him at a lower price tag:
Elfrid Payton:
Look, is Elfrid Payton an NBA player? Sure, yeah, he’s probably a third guard on an OK team. Are the Knicks going to pick up the second year of his contract and sink another $8 million into him, rather than just buy him out for his $1 million guarantee? At the time I started this piece, the answer was, “Hopefully not.” Now, we know that the Knicks have turned that option down. I don’t think Payton will be back.
Reggie Bullock: Bullock shot .402/.333/.810 after coming back from back surgery in January, which isn’t half bad. More importantly, he’s shooting .430/.385/.826 over his seven-year career and had a team option for only a little over $4 million next year thanks to the aforementioned back injury, after he initially signed a deal worth $10 million a season last summer. The Knicks picked that option up, because Bullock’s on a value deal that could grease a trade for the Knicks, or just be a good player to have around. He won’t see free agency.
So that brings us to Taj Gibson, Moe Harkless, and Damyean Dotson. I think we can safely say that these three are the only ones that have any real chance of hitting free agency and ending up back on the Knicks. I feel like Taj is sort of an easy one here, based off his performance last year and the Knicks’ new head coach.
Taj put up some low minutes per game numbers last year (16.5, actually the lowest of his 11-year career), but played the extremely important role of Mitchell Robinson’s security blanket. Mitch doesn’t feel comfortable starting? That’s cool, you can start Taj and bring Mitch in five minutes later, only to barely play Taj any more the rest of the game. It’s a stupid sports cliche, but Taj is the consummate “good vet” that you want on your team — he just does what he’s asked, and never complains.
He even managed to post a career-high field goal percentage last year (.584) and had his fair share of highlights:
Oh yeah, he’s also a Tom Thibodeau favorite, and has played for Thibs in seven of his 11 seasons in the league between Chicago and Minnesota. Safe to say that Thibs will probably want him around to help ease the transition for the youngsters.
So, Professor, my question for you is: do you think the Knicks will bring Taj back on a more team-friendly number for a journeyman big, now that they have his favorite coach at the helm? Or do you think there’s a wild card outcome where Taj just straight up doesn’t end up back in New York next year?
Miranda: I see him coming back on like a two-year, $15 million deal. It gives him the security of a multiyear contract and a nice overall salary bump while giving New York an emeritus to help transition the young players from David Fizdale’s weekend dad kitsch to Mike Miller’s “You’re not my real dad!” energy to Thibodeau’s promising but ominous (prominous) “Wait till your father gets home” vibe. I don’t really care about Taj’s game one way or the other, but in any profession there’s meaningful value in providing mentorship for the noobs. And while no one knows what shape the Knicks will take on over the next few years, there will be noobs.
One of the longest-running mysteries in Knicksville for years is why Damyean Dotson doesn’t play more. And there is something hard about watching the Knicks in the way it’s hard to see your friend who always ends up dating losers ignoring an actual nice person with no red flags. But this is where I, tired of all the lying and pretense and fakeness in dimming world, acknowledge I may be taking Occam’s razor too far. I want to believe there is something enormously problematic about Dotson the person that the public doesn’t know about, and that’s why he doesn’t play regularly. Of course, the most likely explanation for his being overlooked could be that historically this franchise has no idea what to do with young talent. Either way, just because you want your friend to date the nice guy doesn’t mean they oughta get married. As with Gibson, I don’t have strong feelings either way for Dot. Just because everyone’s afraid he’ll take off with his next team doesn’t mean the Knicks know how to unlock him.
As far as Harkless, the numbers lie, then they lie some more. He only played a dozen games in New York, making his stats impossible to base any meaningful projections on. And even those numbers that do jump out don’t withstand closer scrutiny. Harkless averaged 2.5 assists per 36 minutes as a Knick, a career-best figure... but one that includes a season-high six assists in the March finale at Atlanta, twice as many as he had in any other game. Without that effort he’d be at 1.3 per, closer to his career norm. Same with free throw attempts: the three per-36 he put up would be a career-high, unless you take away his Knick-high six FTAs vs. Houston in early March. Then that career-high gets cut nearly in half, in-line with Harkless’ usual numbers.
Gibson, Dotson and Harkless are all at least rumored to play defense, and continuity on that end means as much as it does on offense. I like the idea of Mitchell Robinson and Frank Ntilikina leading defensive units staffed by teammates whose intuitions they intuit after innumerable intwined interfacing. What do you make of Dot, 26, and Moe, 27, as far as the future? If the Knicks were to draft a Tatum or trade for an Anthony Davis, are they the kind of players you build something special with? And for the purposes of the Knicks, “special” doesn’t mean a contender; “special” would be “win a playoff series in the next three years.”
Wolfe: It’s kind of crazy to me to think about how Harkless and Dotson are only a year apart in age, despite Dot still feeling like a guy that we’re more likely to group into the “young core” with Mitch/RJ/Frank/etc., whereas Harkless feels like this wily old vet.
That bias probably has to do with the fact that Harkless came into the NBA as a 19-year-old and has eight years under his belt in the big league, whereas Dotson came in as an old rookie at 23 and has only played three seasons in the NBA. That said, I went to go look into Harkless’ and Dot’s stats expecting to see something that would tell me, “OK, but Dot has at least been showing growth, whereas Harkless stalled out and became the player he was going to be years ago.” But that wasn’t really the case, either!
That’s Damyean Dotson’s per-36 stats for his first three seasons in the league. Sure, we saw a little jump in 3-point percentage from his rookie year to the past two years (32.4% to 36.8% and 36.2%, respectively), but other than that, his base statistical profile is more or less the same every year of his career.
Still, I wrote just a few months ago for Knicks Sports Illustrated (RIP, and also fuck Maven) that I think the Knicks should try to re-sign Dotson, and I still believe that. Over his three years with the Knicks, New York has played -1, +2.4, and +2.4 points per 100 possessions better with Dotson on the floor vs. with him off it, and that’s largely due to the fundamentally-sound brand of basketball that Dotson plays on both ends of the floor.
But even beyond the box score numbers, Dot offered some more to the Knicks this year than previous years. Take this finish for example:
That wasn’t something he really had in his bag the first couple years. Dot was also entrusted a bit more with handling the ball, both receiving handoffs heading to the hoop and occasionally running small pick-and-roll opportunities.
So what does it mean that the Knicks didn’t extend Dotson a qualifying offer, meaning he’ll hit unrestricted free agency? Well, his QO was worth just a hair over $2 million, and if he had accepted that one-year deal, he’d have gotten a de facto no trade clause. His veteran’s minimum contract as a three-year vet would run $1.678 million, which is the level that ESPN’s Bobby Marks predicted Dot would fall in free agency.
Could the Knicks surprise us and bring Dotson back? Maybe, but I doubt it. And maybe that’s for the best, anyway. He somehow survived getting drafted by Phil Jackson, playing under the Mills and Perry regime, and playing under three different coaches, yet never really got a shot to get consistent minutes on the Knicks. Perhaps a change of scenery would be best. He’ll probably end up on Miami and drop a cool 40 points on the Knicks next year.
So, my final prediction? Just Taj ends up back on the Knicks, and perhaps for as little as the veteran’s minimum (though the salary dump acquisition of Ed Davis on Thursday certainly muddies those waters as well). Leon Rose wipes all traces of the Mills/Perry regime from the team as soon as possible.
