RJ a painfully necessary sacrifice for Utah star
THE DRAFT picks are the easy part, let’s be honest. They are attractive to look at, for sure. Knicks president Leon Rose has collected them merrily, guarded them meticulously and jealously. There are 11 first-rounders stowed away carefully under the glass in the Knicks’ warehouse, like a prized collection of stamps, coins or baseball cards.
Rose was not willing to part with a plethora of those picks a few weeks ago when the Spurs were shopping Dejounte Murray, and so he wound up with the Hawks. Murray is an excellent player. He and Jalen Brunson would’ve made a dynamic pairing in the backcourt at the Garden.
But Murray isn’t Donovan Mitchell.
And according to ESPN, Mitchell is once again in play. According to the report, Mitchell — threetime All-Star, Westchester County native, owner of a 23.9 career pointsper-game average — is being dangled by the Jazz. And the Knicks are thought to be at the front of the line, trying to swing a deal.
The Knicks have all those draft picks, and this is precisely why they have assembled them. They are assets, and if you are willing to part with enough of them they can make a deal more attractive. But the Jazz have a smart operation. It will take more than draft picks — even if the Knicks are willing to part with four or five of them, which is what it took Minnesota to pry Rudy Gobert away from Utah.
The Jazz are going to want players. The Jazz are going to want, almost certainly, RJ Barrett (and, if I were a betting man, one from among Immanuel Quickley, Quentin Grimes or Obi Toppin). And this is where things get hard. This is the point, if you are Leon Rose, at which you have to ask yourself a cold-blooded question: Which version of my roster drags the Knicks closer to where they need to be? Barrett would be a tough sacrifice. Knicks fans have watched him grow up over three years. He is still only 22. His work ethic and capacity for improvement are matters of public record. And he is probably the most popular player on the team right now. He could be a perennial All-Star. But Mitchell — himself just 25 years old and locked up contractually for four more years — is a perennial All-Star. He has had winning in his blood forever, first at Louisville, lately with the Jazz. As tempting as a Brunson-Murray backcourt was to ponder, a Brunson-Mitchell partnership could truly project to being a cornerstone of an eventual contender.
Me? When the choice is young
with accomplishment versus younger with upside, I will take the former every time. And I absolutely love watching Barrett play, have loved watching him blossom at the Garden before our eyes. Is it a massive haul? It is. Is Mitchell certain to vault the Knicks into topfour status in the Eastern Conference next year? He is not. But the Knicks are in danger right now of being in an even more difficult predicament than they were before Rose arrived, when they were simply an annual piece of the NBA’s dregs. At least when you’re awful every year, there’s the lottery — even if, in the Knicks’ case, that has proven to be a fool’s-gold quest the last 37 years. Where they are now? Stuck in the never-never land of mediocrity, of 35 to 45 wins every year — too good to have legit lottery odds, too bad to be reckoned with as credible contenders — is a hamster wheel of oblivion, a treadmill to nowhere. At some point, you have to go for the carrot.
Is Mitchell that carrot? What he is, more likely, is the kind of player who makes the Knicks a more attractive option than they’ve been in 25 years for future free agents with wanderlust in their hearts. And again, the question is this: What version of the Knicks’ roster makes that more plausible, with Barrett or with Mitchell?
It says here, with Mitchell. The cost will be steep, and losing Barrett will sting, and for those for whom firstround picks are more valuable than platinum, there will be some wrung hands. But Knicks fans are immune to the pain by now; all they crave is a cure. Mitchell would be a pricey cure. But he would make them better. And that’s supposed to still matter.