GREENBUGH, NY — There are many ways to think of the new era in Knicks basketball promised by the hiring of Scott Perry as general manager, in large part due to the seemingly directionless series of stops and starts that preceded him, but also by some blurred lines of command in the new hierarchy.
There’s what we can glean from his time in Sacramento, which was promising and earned praise around the league. But that time, while most recent, lasted just a few months. Comparatively, his experience with the Pistons ended a decade ago with six straight trips to the Eastern Conference Finals and the 2004 NBA championship. His follow-up tenure in Orlando, then as assistant general manager for the Magic, produced neither sustained success nor a roadmap for how a Perry team might play.
Still, the addition of Perry, for all the questions from reporters Monday afternoon at the Knicks’ practice facility about past battles between Phil Jackson and Carmelo Anthony, Jackson and Kristaps Porzingis, Jackson and the preferred offensive philosophy of his many head coaches, is a departure from Jackson in another way — he has ample front office experience Jackson, for all his rings and fame, simply didn’t possess when he took over in New York.
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Perhaps that is why he remained so opaque: to avoid bad headlines, maximize his options and best of all, fail to antagonize and lower the trade value of his best assets. Perry repeatedly declined to engage in questions about all that happened before he came to New York, with the exception of weighing in enthusiastically on behalf of the latest pre-Perry Knicks acquisitions, first round pick Frank Ntilikina and free agent Tim Hardaway Jr., who president Steve Mills, seated beside Perry, said was his very first call shortly after midnight on July 1.
“As we look at the numbers, we believe Tim is a starting two guard in this league,” Mills said, by way of explaining just what the Knicks were thinking with a four-year, $71 million contract that greatly exceeded what was required to pry him away from the Hawks. “The capability to be a starting two guard for the rest of his career in the league, and those guys average $16, $16.5 million dollars in the NBA today.”
This was a startling concept of value expressed by Mills, and dovetails with something else Perry didn’t say on Monday: that he would have final call on basketball decisions.
Take that apart for a moment. That the Knicks paid Hardaway like an average starting two guard because that’s what average two guards typically make, even if they are right about Hardaway’s ceiling, requires that they are correct about Hardaway and even then makes for a missed opportunity. If Hardaway truly is a starting two guard, and the Knicks had a chance to sign him for less than the going rate, that’s precisely how to leverage a salary cap league to build a championship team.
It’s an extreme example, of course, but one way Golden State became a champion was because they not only had Stephen Curry during their rise, they had him at a well below market value rate. So even before taking into account things like artificially inflated average two guard salary based on last summer’s unrepeated long-term deals, it betrays a real one-dimensional version of team-building.
Which brings us to how else to project what these new Knicks can be. If not Perry’s track record, then Mills’? Well, he’s previously served as general manager and team president of the Knicks, and not during the team’s glory years. And here’s how Mills described the power structure: “I’m going to give Scott the room to make basketball decisions and make recommendations to me. He’s going to have a chance to manage the coaching staff, manage the scouting staff and make recommendations about where we should go as an organization. I think we’ll be partners in the sense that he’ll come to me with his recommendation and we’ll debate it back and forth. At the end of the day, I’m giving him room to make those decisions.”
You following that? Neither did the reporters in the room, some of whom asked Perry about his timetable to move Anthony in the right deal, others Mills. It’s been Mills in conversation with Porzingis via text. And then Jeff Hornacek, head coach selected by Jackson who remains, expressed by far the most specific vision for how he expects his Knicks to play.
“One big thing as a coach is we want to establish an identity,” Hornacek said. “And that identity is defense first.”
Again, it was a curious thing to say. Not that defense is a bad thing, of course, but Hornacek’s best success as a coach came with a Suns team in 2013-14 that finished eighth in the league in offense. None of his four Suns teams reached the top half of the league in defensive efficiency, nor did any of his three Jerry Sloan teams when he was an assistant in Utah. Hornacek mentioned the Sloan teams he played for in the mid-1990s, but even those teams cannot be considered defense-first outfits, not when their offensive efficiency was consistently top-three in the NBA.
I asked Hornacek if he thought the Knicks, as currently constructed, could play that way this season. “Well, we’re going to give it our best shot with the roster we have,” he said. “And if there are guys out there more capable of filling roles, I’m sure Scott and Steve will do something about it.”
And if Scott and Steve disagree? That’s where the other big unknown of the Knicks comes into play: Jim Dolan.
Look, the Knicks have tried competence before, at least in theory. Donnie Walsh was respected around the league, had a long track record of success and was promised, in a way Perry apparently hasn’t been, full autonomy. Ultimately, Dolan interfered in a way that drove Walsh out. And the reason Jackson was so welcomed, beyond the championships, was this: the combination of his fame and the enormous price tag attached to his contract served as a kind of Dolan insurance.
Perry said he intended to evaluate basketball ops. But can he make changes? Even Jackson didn’t have full autonomy to do so. Instead, Perry focused on being able to add people if he saw fit. But that’s not controlling the process, that’s just adding voices to the conversation.
So for this to work, a number of things must happen. Dolan must have learned from both the Walsh experience that interference is a mistake and from the Jackson experience that experience is key — or better still be so enamored with his music career that it no longer matters to him what the Knicks do. Still, it is a discouraging sign for the former that David Griffin wasn’t able to get final say on basketball matters, and that Perry, by all accounts, doesn’t have it either.
The Steve and Scott Show is a gang of two, and if the tiebreaker is the guy who signs the checks, well, that’s a return to the process that produced the very worst decisions of the 21st century Knicks experience.
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Perry recognized that for all the happy talk on day one of his tenure, it will be defined by actions.
“Culture looks like what we do on a daily basis,” Perry said.
No truer definition of the Knicks exists than that sentence. And Scott Perry, for all his experience and wisdom, appears to have less leverage to change it than his predecessors.