Whats the argument for Dantoni not playing Marbury though? Obviously he had plenty of problems in the past but Donnie told him to get in great shape which he did. Dantoni acted like a snake, telling QRich that he was gonna bench Marbury in that first home opener. Then QRich went and told the whole team, everyone knew except Marbury. Thats poor communication and coaching. I could see if we had another good point guard on the team, I'd be willing to buy into the "Marbury is a cancer" argument but Chris Fukkin Duhon?
I honestly think the bigger cancers on that team that shoulda been the primary targets for Walsh and Dant to get rid of were QRich, Jerome James, Curry, and Jeffries. I gotta say Crawford too, at that time he was less efficient then he is now, a turnover prone chucker that played zero defense. Z-Bo is the one guy that raises questions with me. I just looked at his stats. We were winning games and he was averaging a career high in rebounds. That would be my biggest issue with Walsh is i was anti-Walsh, not gettin more for ZBo even if the deal was mostly made to clear cap space which it was. Zbo for Tim Thomas and Cuttino Mobley?
hboy: Shoulda got a 1st round pick too
TBH...I don't know.
At first I thought, "Well, MDA didn't play Steph b/c he didn't trust him, he didn't think he was a good leader, whatever."
And then he didn't play Nate after Nate shot at our own hoop and mouthed off when MDA tried to hold him accountable. And I was okay with that, we were winning at that point and I understand punishing a guy for talking back.
But then Chris Duhon happened to keep getting minutes while Nate sat on the bench. I would have liked to see Jordan Hill get minutes before we moved him. Hughes was sometimes playing, sometimes he wasn't.
A lot of people on here were anti-QRich, his whole tenure kind of confused me. People accused Q of being MDA's little snitch (even getting the name QSnitch by some on here)...but if MDA and Q were that close, I would think Q would have signed here...
Look, Jamal is an okay player. That's all he is. He thrives now on an Atlanta team that is deep and insanely athletic. I would never want Crawford to be by #1 or #2 option...but in ATL, he's behind Joe Johnson, Smoove, Horford and has a couple other guys to take the heat off of him...Crawford as a #4 option is solid, nobody can doubt it.
Overall - I just think when Walsh came in, he knew this was a troubled franchise. It was poisoned so to speak. You are seeing it now in Cleveland, they are just going to dump as many guys as possible and start over, being there from LeBron's blowup versus the Celtics last year (I still cannot wait to know what happened behind the scenes), and then him leaving so publicly...
The team was toxic. The locker room was toxic. I don't think that the trades were as much of blaming ZBo and Crawford as they were blaming Isiah. Everyone had to go. The reset button had to be hit, the locker room needed resetting...could Marbury have been just casualty #1 in a long hitlist? I am obviously not behind the scenes, I have no idea.
But it seemed to me like the poison festering in the locker room, the losing culture, the attitude, I think rightly or wrongly Stephon Marbury was Public Enemy #1 - fairly or not, he was dubbed the poster child for everything that was wrong with the organization - and 15 games into the season NY set the tone by beginning to purge us of the bloated contracts to attempt to start over.
And that's what Walsh did.
Think about this for a second: The player who has been a Knick longest that is on the team right now is TONEY DOUGLAS. 2010 wasn't just a number, it wasn't one player, it wasn't ever just LeBron.
It was flexibility, it was about getting rid of basically every person in that locker room who was part of the Isiah-regime. Walsh wanted nothing to do with Isiah's guys - and he sold them, talent-wise for fifteen cents on the dollar.
Walsh came here in salary cap hell, he made it clear as day from the get-go his goal was to attain flexibility and rebuild from the ground up.
That's why Zach and Jamal and Steph and James and Curry had to go. Not b/c any of them are bad players or bad people. But because this franchise had to start over. That was always the issue. No coach, in my eyes, would have saved Zach, Jamal or Steph...those guys had a foot out the door once Isiah was relieved of his duties.