Despite having all the confidence in the world a few months ago that a superstar would come to New York, the Knicks were unable to get one of the bigger names on the free agent market. The most prominent example of this came when two players linked to the team, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, decided to instead go and play in Brooklyn.
There were some rumblings that the pair were interested in teaming up, but until it happened, it was a bit of a pipe dream, partly because the list of places where they could have teamed up was so small. That included the Knicks, which, obviously, went 0-for-2.
The latest episode of The Woj Pod featured Adrian Wojnarowski and Ramona Shelburne of ESPN, and it touched on a few of the major free agent storylines around the league. One was just how the the Knicks managed to strike out on Durant, who was believed to have his eye on the team for some time, and Irving, a New Jersey native for whom they were the favorites to land for a stretch. As Shelburne laid out in the podcast (for those who want to listen, it’s around the 23-minute mark), there were a few reasons why.
One, understandably, was that it took some “guts” that the Knicks just did not have to sign Irving after his spell in Boston and Durant fresh off of a potentially career-altering injury, especially when the team has been burned by overpaying for injured superstars in the past. While admitting it could have been a “chicken and the egg” scenario due to the fact both guys might have already been past joining the team, Shelburne brought up that New York did not offer max deals to either one of them.
The potentially more interesting note is the second reason this might have gotten away from them: the Knicks just did not understand that Durant and Irving wanted to play together.
But I think maybe where they lost the whole game was in misreading the situation and how close Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving were. I heard all along, Kevin was gonna make his own decision, he wasn’t dependent on anybody else, and I think he did make his own decision. But I don’t think you could understate how close that friendship he has with Kyrie Irving and especially DeAndre Jordan was. And the Knicks, they decided they were out on Kyrie Irving kind of early. Some of that is a chicken and the egg thing, too — they were out because he was out. But they kinda stopped and they made sort of a calculated decision of, like, ok, Kyrie needs Kevin a lot more than Kevin needs Kyrie, and they were wrong. Those two wanted to play together and I think if maybe if they would have slid somebody else in there, if they would have come up with the sort of second star for him to play with, somebody he got along with, a friend that could help in recruiting him, I think that might have helped. But they just read it wrong, and then they didn’t have the stomach for it, either.
In fairness to the Knicks, Durant did proudly say that he was impossible to recruit, so it makes some sense that they would undervalue his relationship with Irving. Still, in a superstar-driven league, operating under the assumption that good players will help you land more good players is probably wise. Perhaps that calculus would have changed if not for Durant’s injury and Irving’s breakup with the Celtics, but for the rest of time, that will serve as one of the NBA’s great “What Ifs?”
