This Will be Interesting

Kyrie, KD, and DeAndre Jordan are apparently all heading to New York City to play!  By New York City, I mean Brooklyn and this has the potential to be the most interesting basketball move made here in years.

Let’s start with the optimistic view. Durant heals and returns to being one of the best players in the league. Paired with Kyrie and DeAndre, he turns the Nets into a championship team. Add in the fact that the Knicks have been horrible for 20 years and appear to have whiffed completely on free agency, and you might see a change in the rooting dynamics in our city- which is overwhelmingly skewed towards the Knicks.

On the flip side, what happens if Durant returns diminished, Kyrie continues to piss people off, and the Nets don’t become a great team?  The Nets will have swung and missed in a very public way and won’t be contenders for five years at least.

But here’s the hideous thing from a Knicks perspective. Their icompetent owner will almost certainly overreact to this super team created on his doorstep and overpay for mediocre talent. The spiral of doom will continue. I hope I’m wrong, but we all know I’m not.

The Curse of the Knicks

The Knicks haven’t played a game in two months. but they somehow keep losing. First came the draft lottery, where they fell to third. Then came a big Nets trade which enables them to match the Knicks dollar for dollar in free agency. And last night, their number one free agent target, Kevin Durant, crumbled to the floor with an apparent ACL injury that will almost certainly keep him off the court the rest of this calendar year and raises serious questions about his future performance.

And while most sane franchises would now steer way clear of Durant, it is almost a certainty the Knicks will bid against themselves and offer him a max deal to come to NY even with the injury questions. Probably the only way it doesn’t happen is if Durant decides to exercise his player option for next season and then hits free agency after the 2019-2020 season. Otherwise, we could see the strange spectacle of a guy on crutches signing a deal for over $100-million.  Only in New York kids, only in Knickland