You guys really think the
Knicks are going to do anything to help us improve our supporting cast?
Come on now...if anything, this would be playing with fire on our part, not theirs.
The Knicks never ever had the "basketball quality" appeal as far as landing LeBron. The Knicks' draw, as far as Lebron is concerned, consists of 2 things. 1) The city they play in, and 2) Coach D'Antoni
Donnie Walsh had a playoff team at the start of the season. He COMPLETELY gutted it. That shows me that he will stop at nothing to have the salary cap space to bring basketball back to Madison Square Garden whether the savior is LBJ, Wade, Bosh, Amare, Joe Johnson, whomever. The Knicks CANNOT, I repeat, CANNOT have the #1 item on their list, the salary cap space, if they pay both Lee and Nate Robinson their fair market value. And its pretty safe to assume both of them won't take pay cuts for the "possibility of playing with LeBron next year".
They are in a position where they have to choose between Robinson and Lee. Robinson's fair market value is lower than Lee's...so they'll have even more cap space to add additional pieces to go along with their max player for 2010 (they're definitely going to get one, just not LBJ). Which is where we come into the picture...we excuse them from the wrenching dilemma of choosing between Robinson and Lee, and make them an offer of further cap savings (and a VERY bad team in 2009-10, but I doubt Walsh cares...like I said, the team that's actually THERE was never a draw for the Class of 2010 anyway...).
Perhaps we S&T Varejao to a short but inflated contract and Pavlovic's 4.9 mil cap number (the team actually has to pay only 1M of it, this is the draw for Donnie Walsh), to bring Lee into town. Or, if Varejao agrees to his fair market value, then we work a buyout of Big Ben to chop his cap number down to a do-able amount, and trade him with Sasha for Lee.
I don't know...Lee's one of my favorite players, so forgive me if I'm being unrealistic...I tried my best to make this as conceivable as possible.