It's just a matter of time now before Amar'e Stoudemire rejoins the New York Knicks. After practicing with the Erie BayHawks, the team's D-League affiliate, and reportedly looking good and explosive in his scrimmage work, the 30-year-old power forward appears to be nearing the end of his rehabilitation from surgery to remove dead tissue in his surgically repaired left knee.

He's not ready yet, but he's close to once again donning a Knicks uniform ... which, according to Howard Beck at the New York Times, is something that New York's front office worked very hard this offseason (and even before that) to prevent from happening again:

This past summer, the Knicks offered Stoudemire to nearly every team in the league — “available for free,” as one rival executive put it. But they found no takers because of his diminished production, his health and his contract, which has three years and $65 million remaining (counting this season) and which is uninsured against a career-ending knee injury. In February, the Knicks wanted to send Stoudemire to Toronto in a deal for Andrea Bargnani, a person briefed on the discussion said. But the proposal was vetoed by James L. Dolan, the Garden chairman, before it ever reached the Raptors (who would not have made the deal anyway, team officials there said). Before that, the Knicks tried to package Stoudemire and Chandler in a bid to land Dwight Howard.

Grantland's Zach Lowe responded to Beck's report by saying he too has heard that Stoudemire is "basically the most available player in the league," which is, of course, pretty easy to understand. After all, the Knicks have raced out to the Eastern Conference's best record without Stoudemire in the lineup, roasting teams with Carmelo Anthony turning in dominant offensive play in place of Amar'e at power forward, Tyson Chandler being perhaps the league's most unassuming MVP candidate, and the point-guard tandem of Raymond Felton and Jason Kidd whipping the ball around the perimeter in an unselfish and deeply fun-to-watch brand of basketball orchestrated by coach Mike Woodson, who seems about 100 million light years away from the "Iso-Joe" days of his Atlanta Hawks.

[Related: The Knicks' best player may not be Carmelo Anthony]

The fear among Knicks fans is that Stoudemire's return will throw a monkey wrench into what has become the league's most potent offense; New York scored about 6 1/2 fewer points per 100 possessions with Stoudemire on the court last year than when he was off it, according to lineup data available from NBA.com's stat tool. And it's not like a Knicks team that's slid from a top-five defense last year to just below middle-of-the-pack in defensive efficiency this season would figure to benefit much from importing a famously ineffective defender even at his healthy athletic peak; New York allowed about 4 1/2 more points per-100 last year with him playing than with him sitting.

Those on/off-court numbers back up a slew of other data — advanced metrics, video breakdowns, detailed scouting reports, the general eyeball test of watching different incarnations of teams perform — supporting the contention that we (and many others) have written about before plenty of times, including in our Knicks season preview: that a Chandler/Stoudemire/Anthony frontcourt simply does not work on either end of the court, because they just don't fit together to create something greater than the sum of the All-Star parts.

Knowing that Chandler is indispensable and having made the decision to hand the reins of the franchise to a healthy 28-year-old Anthony rather than the injury-prone 30-year-old Stoudemire — a decision that looks wiser by the day, it's worth noting — of course the Knicks would look to move Stoudemire. And of course nobody bit on the gargantuan $64.7 million remaining on his contract, because why would you make that kind of financial gamble if you didn't absolutely have to?

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