Here’s Why The Knicks aren’t Tanking this Year

The Knicks will be bad this year. But not THAT bad.

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Let’s talk tanking.

You probably read the title and your first thought was, “Of course the New York Knicks are tanking, you moron. They’re going to be garbage this year.”

And you’re right, they are likely going to be bad this year. However, while the Knicks are rebuilding, it’s not because the team is tanking.

The word “tanking” is used frequently by NBA fans to describe bad teams. Yet when it comes to tanking, there is a common misconception that exists: Not every bad or rebuilding team is purposefully tanking. Some teams are bad because they lack star power or promising young players, while others may have a poorly constructed roster with contractual albatrosses.

It’s important to note the difference between tanking and development, because the idea of purposefully losing games can vastly differ from using a season to help young players improve.

In order to properly address this topic, we need to first define what tanking truly means. Here’s one definition from former SB Nation writer, Mark Deeks:

“Tanking,” as we are to understand it, is a team’s intent to do less than everything it can to win. It is a concerted effort over several months (and perhaps several seasons) by a team to deliberately not be as good as it could be.

So in order to tank, the front office of Team X must do whatever it takes to put subpar and/or unproven talent on the court. Losing games is winning, and winning games is losing. Adding players who can make an immediate, positive impact on the court that translates into wins is considered negative in this context because it can affect the team’s odds at landing the number one pick.

Additionally, the Oxford English Dictionary defines development as “a specified state of growth or advancement.” Whereas tanking feels like a team’s going backwards, development feels like a step forward.

Taking this into consideration, the Knicks aren’t tanking this season. Well, the Knicks aren’t planning on tanking the entire season, and their moves this past off-season prove it. For New York, it’s more about developing the team’s young core with the goal of improving a little bit every day than it is the front office hoping the team loses as many games as possible to potentially land a higher pick. The Knicks will be bad but it will be because of growing pains, not from purposeful tanking by the front office.

It is possible to simultaneously tank and develop players for an entire season. The Philadelphia 76ers trusted the process from 2013–16 and it has yielded only two healthy, NBA-caliber players: Robert Covington and T.J. McConnell. The future seems bright for Philadelphia, and only time will tell if the process was worth it, but the dark ages were when the Sixers filled their team with bad players they never intended to keep long term. They have yet to develop any healthy game-changers thus far. It’s less that tanking doesn’t work and more that almost all of the players at rock bottom aren’t still on the team when things progress.

The biggest difference between a tanker and a developer is that the front office of a tanking team sets its current team up for failure (see previous paragraph), while the front office of a developing team is trying to set its current team up for success. The former describes the Knicks at the end of the 2014–15 season (e.g., Jason Smith, Travis Wear, Shane Larkin and Samuel Dalembert) while the latter shows the Knicks are committed to building around the young players who are here to stay.

Hey, I get it. I understand why we throw around the T-word. It’s easier to shout and tweet “TANK!” about one’s favorite team than it is “DEVELOP!” Personally, I’m cool with the concept of a team tanking. I value long-term gains over short-term ones when the short-term ceiling is low. A total of 10 different franchises have won a NBA championship since the 1986 season. That’s compared with 15 in the NHL, 18 in the MLB and 14 for the NFL. The expression “it’s better to be lucky than good” doesn’t hold much weight in the NBA. Fairytale runs seldom happen in a league dominated by dynasties.

That doesn’t mean I believe a team should tank in perpetuity. At a certain point, teams have to start turning those prospects into winning, NBA-caliber starters and players, for the sake of both themselves and their fans.

When it comes to tanking, there’s an objective: lose as many games as possible for that number one pick.

But to root for development? Where’s the fun in that? How does the casual Knicks fan gain satisfaction from such a strategy?

Win-loss records are black-and-white. You either win a game or you lose it, simple as that. So how do we measure development? Do we quantify the development of these players by their own goals and expectations, the ones by the media, the ones by the fans or some sort of combination of the three? What’s a fair way to assess how the team should be doing?

If you’re going to lose, you might as well lose with a purpose. After all, losing’s the easy part in a rebuild; it’s going up from rock bottom that becomes the hard part. You have to learn to crawl before you walk, walk before you run and run before you sprint. For years, the Knicks tried to sprint before learning how to run, let alone crawl.

Except there is a purpose, and that purpose is to help Kristaps Porzingis, Frank Ntilikina, Tim Hardaway Jr. and Willy Hernangomez continue to improve. With the pieces New York has, the Knicks aren’t learning how to crawl this season because they’re past that stage. Instead, they’re going to try to walk. They’ll trip, stumble and bumble, but there’s no need to continue crawling on an eternal tanking treadmill.

Another thing you may be saying to yourself is “The Knicks traded Carmelo Anthony. They’re obviously tanking.” Ohhh, do I have an analogy for you.

Imagine you own a series of mostly lousy farms, orchards and fruit plantations called “JD and the Straight Rots Inc.” You’ve recently been having some problems with your produce thanks to poor management. Your award-winning banana plantation, which has yielded your best produce for years, won’t be producing much longer. Yes, the Carmelo BananAnthony Plantation has seen better days, and it has become too expensive to keep and it’s interfering with your other ventures. Every time you thought the fruits would quickly go from green to brown, you would gently whisper to each banana plant, “Stay yellow.”

The banana plantation cost an arm and a leg (specifically a shoulder and a knee) to buy originally, and while you had some good moments and some bad moments, it was simply time to go your separate ways. So you sold the banana plantation to a rich guy in Oklahoma for the best offer possible: some Turkish figs, corn from Iowa and a future seed packet of your choice. Additionally, your once-prized Rose decayed in front of your very eyes in your farm’s famed garden, plus one of the best gardeners went on Holiday to Chicago, and will not be returning to work for you.

There’s good news though! In addition to your recently acquired Kristapple orchard and your pig and Willy goat farm in Spain (shout out to Jose Calderon), you now have: a) a promising winery courtesy of Strasbourg, France, and b) an expensive hawk from the city of Atlanta that will attract customers and protect the back court…yard of the garden.

The apple orchard, the pig and goat farm, the winery and the hawk will take some time and patience to make you a profit. Did your portfolio take a short-term hit from selling the banana plantation, losing both the rose and the gardener while obtaining new projects? It absolutely did, but it was a decision you had to make. The difference is that you now have really promising prospects and you want to develop them. You’re also not going to focus all your attention on that bakery you own, even if the Baker’s services cost more than others might have paid.

The goal is to put all your energy into making the newly acquired assets under your power reach their own individual, maximum potential, show signs of success and then use those gains to obtain more assets. Unlike your competition in Chicago and Atlanta, you have the assets and foundation to start building an empire. You’re nowhere near the top but it’s now easier to envision how to get there. Maybe you’re an asset or two away from future domination, but unlike your direct competition this year, your cupboard isn’t almost completely bare.

That is exactly why the Knicks are focusing on developing their players and finishing wherever they land in the standings versus purposefully tanking an entire season. New York gave their hawk (Hardaway) the hefty contract they did because adding a player who averaged 17.5 points per game, 3.6 rebounds per game and 3.2 assists per game on 44.3 field goal percentage and 34.3 three-point percentage as a starter last season is a positive step in the right direction. A tanking team would have preferred to remain financially flexible to take on a salary dump and receive an asset. With that said, the Knicks signed the 25-year old because he’s a shooting guard entering his prime, not because the team is intent on tanking. The argument on whether Hardaway is worth his contract is moot because this argument isn’t about the money, it’s about the principle.

Furthermore, if the Knicks really wanted to lose as many games as possible this season, they could have traded Courtney Lee, regardless of the return. A three-and-D wing is a commodity in this league, even if that player is 32 and has three years left on his contract on a fair deal ($36,761,340 remaining). Instead, Lee’s good enough to hit open shots, supply adequate defense and leadership to make the teammates around him better, which could translate to more wins this year. Keeping Lee is doing the opposite of what a tanking team would do and everything that a developing team should do.

The Knicks may have less talent this season than last season but losing talent doesn’t automatically equate to tanking. The Chicago Bulls traded their franchise cornerstone in Jimmy Butler for peanuts, bought out their two next best players (Rajon Rondo and then Dwyane Wade) and dealt the 38th pick in the 2017 draft (Jordan Bell)… for cash. A rebuilding team was more concerned about its owner making more money than adding talent on the court.

Meanwhile, the Hawks traded Paul Millsap and Dwight Howard for a combined haul of Jamal Crawford (waived), Miles Plumlee, Marco Belinelli, Diamond Stone (waived), a future first round pick (protected), the 41st pick in the 2016 draft (Tyler Dorsey) and cash. Atlanta’s only notable free agent additions were signing Ersan Ilyasova and Dewayne Dedmon.

Those are two examples of soon-to-be tanking teams. The Knicks did not choose such a path. Instead, they looked to add or keep talent on their roster… with the exception of Anthony. That may seem almost hypocritical but the difference is the Knicks needed to move on from Anthony and the media circus that followed him so that the team and players could focus solely on developing.

Perhaps the definition of tanking is merely semantics. After all, by trading Anthony, New York’s front office is comfortable with the likelihood of losing more games in the present in exchange for potentially more wins in the future.

Maybe if things go awry (AKA as planned?), they’ll trade their best veterans, give significant minutes to young players like Damyean Dotson and Luke Kornet and tank the final third of the season. Until then, the plan is for the Knicks to focus on developing their young core players and helping them get better each day. The higher the draft pick in June, the sweeter it is for the Knicks.