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  • How excited are you?

  • You know, with the rebirth for the Knicks, because the city is giddy, man.

  • I mean, they had a parade just for them to be five hundred.

  • Man, you have people walking down the street like they were like they won a championship.

  • So, you know, are you excited about the future?

  • And now, are the Knicks cool enough to maybe attract a star?

  • And do they make that before the trade deadline?

  • Or do they wait till the offseason?

  • Try and get over Depot?

  • Is he a starting?

  • Let me answer that first question first, when I think about the Knicks, I'm incredibly excited, and I'm proud of the job they're doing.

  • I'm proud of Leon Rose.

  • I'm proud of my man worldwide West, William Wesley, Scott Perry to GM, and I can't say enough about Tom Thibodeau because I think I've always felt he was a hell of a coach.

  • Um, and I think he's proven that yet again.

  • The guy lives, eats and breathes basketball.

  • There's nothing else going on in his life that we know of.

  • There's nothing else that he wants to give.

  • The impression is going on in his life.

  • other than basketball.

  • And you know that every night, the next step out on the court, they are going to be well prepared.

  • Whether they play officially or not remains to be seen, but they're going to be well prepared.

  • And so I picked it up and they're going to have heart.

  • You're not going to be a soft team being coached by Tom Thibodeau.

  • He's not gonna have it.

  • He's a rough rider.

  • You're not going to be soft, Okay, so we know they're going to compete.

  • We know they're going to defend.

  • As a result, we know they're gonna be in more games than not, which makes them respectable.

  • And I would tell you I would go so far as to say this to both of you guys.

  • If the New York Knicks make it to the first round of the playoffs, but the Nets don't make it to the Finals, the Knicks will actually have had a more successful season than the Brooklyn Nets.

  • Because what were we expecting from them?

  • But we're expecting everything from the Brooklyn Nets when you assemble Lethal Weapon three.

  • Anything less than the birth to the to the NBA Finals is unacceptable, but the New York Knicks getting to the playoffs with a respectable being, a respectable five hundred or above five hundred team.

  • I mean, my God, that's an incredible achievement.

  • Nobody would have anticipated that.

  • So that's the position that they're in right now.

  • Now, here's where it gets a bit tricky when you talk about attracting stars.

  • I am of the belief that if Leon Rose in World wide West, we're here with Scott Perry, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving would have been in the New York Knicks uniform.

  • I believe they would have.

  • I believe they would have pulled that off, but they did, but they weren't here.

  • So as a result, what you're seeing now is culture building taking place before our very eyes.

  • Just establishing.

  • There's a certain way we're gonna do things.

  • We're seeing James Dolan not making headlines with petty, petulant behavior that's making the back pages getting in the way of basketball operations.

  • He's staying out of the way and let Leon Rose and those guys do their things.

  • My only concern is that Tom Thibodeau, that great coach that I respect so much he's too much of a rough rider at times, and sometimes I worry about him taking his foot off the gas because that might not attract players.

  • You can't have Julius Randle playing back to back thirty eight and forty minutes nights like he did prior to the NBA All Star break.

  • You can't have stuff like that happening.

  • You don't want to do that to him.

  • Even a guy like Nerlens Noel.

  • That's not a big deal because he's coming off the bench and all the things he was in there that much because Mr Robinson got hurt.

  • I get it, but you have to monitor the minute you forth.

  • God's could play because of Thibodeau's reputation in Chicago.

  • That's what you have to be careful of because even though Derrick Rose loves them and it's happy to be back playing for him and stuff like that when Gar Forman and Paxson on those boys in Chicago, there was a lot of noise about the relationship Thibodeau did not have with those guys because they thought about doing stuff one way and Thibodeau thought about doing it another way.

  • And then when you went to Minnesota, he tried to alter that a little bit and it kind of alienated Jimmy Butler because he felt like he wasn't hard enough on Karl Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins.

  • So you've got to find a happy medium where you're not taking your foot off the gas, but you're not pushing the pedal to the metal either, in order to attract the right free agent.

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How excited are you?

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