MSGKnickz33
The Gold Mac
Below is from Al Hahn on his Newsday Blog
Let's get to the matter at hand - Chris Duhon. I mean it's Chris Duhon. The Knicks made a serious play -- raised their half-MLE offer to full price, which means Duhon doubled his salary coming off a down year -- which shows you two things:
1. Mike D'Antoni sees something promising in Duhon that we haven't seen in Chicago.
2. Donnie Walsh saw the market and saw few viable options to replace Stephon Marbury.
But is Duhon enough? Does he make you better? Maybe you can argue that he makes you better because of the addition-by-subtraction rule. Marbury is a perpetual ticking timebomb. No matter how many times you want to believe he means it this time, at this point even his own teammates don't believe it. Stephon says all the right things at the start but he's always a mine buried in the locker room just waiting to be triggered. One false step and kaboom.
The players are tired of it. Several of them told me Marbury is mostly a loner in that room at this point. No one takes him seriously, but the distractions he can cause -- and perpetuate with his comments and actions -- are an annoyance.
So if a trade to acquire Steve Blake isn't something Portland is willing to do (I'm told they weren't) and Monta Ellis isn't something Golden State is willing to do (ditto) and just about any other potentially available PG either doesn't quite fit style-wise (Kyle Lowry) or doesn't fit financially (Baron Davis, pre-Clippers), then Duhon might have been the best option that still fit the Bigger Plan.
The Marbury situation might take some time to play out or it might be resolved by Wednesday, when the moratorium expires. A buyout is the most likely result because a trade would mean taking on equal salary -- makes no sense for the Knicks -- and Marbury is a better gamble for other teams to sign with the MLE or veteran's minimum. And he will get interest at that level.
The Knicks can only hope the effect his departure has had in his previous stops -- Phoenix and New Jersey became playoff teams -- continues in New York.
I was just talkin to a nets fan earlier about an hour ago and he was tellin me how marbury would always look to set up his teammates throughout the game and they would miss most their shots so he felt like he had to be the man in the 4th. The nets made a couple moves besides trading marbury...drafting richard jefferson was one of them.
Phoenix also had a new team when Nash became the point guard...that was q-richs first year as a sun and jim jackson was a big factor for them off the bench.
Its ignorant for homos to say all the teams marbury played for got better after he left. Its ignorant because the people who say this ignore other factors like those i pointed out above.