5 BOROUGH SPORTS

After yesterday’s news about the departure of Knicks’ GM Donnie Walsh, a lot of Knicks fans seemed very heated. At first, I was pissed off at Dolan. He’s a moron who hasn’t made a good decision since taking over as king of the Garden in 2001. But then I started thinking, what has Walsh done for the Knicks in his three years as GM? The only positive I could think of was signing Amare Stoudemire. I know that he traded for Carmelo, but let’s look into that trade. From my standpoint, it looked as if the Knicks were completely taken advantage of by the Nuggets. Walsh constantly repeated that he would never give up his young studs Danilo Gallinari and Wilson Chandler for Carmelo. But in the end not only did he give away Chandler and Gallo, he also gave up Raymond Felton and Timofey Mozgov. Even though the Knicks also received Chauncey Billups, this trade still seemed to heavily favor the Nuggets.

Another Walsh decision that irked me was during the 2009 NBA draft. With the Knicks having the 8th overall pick, Walsh decided to draft Jordan Hill, a forward out of the University of Arizona. During Hill’s short tenure with the Knicks, he saw very minimal playing time. By the 2009-2010 season’s trade deadline, Walsh traded Hill to the Rockets for…Tracey McGrady. TMac played in a Knicks uniform during an unimportant two months then he signed with the Pistons the next year. In that 2009 draft, the Knicks could’ve instead selected Brandon Jennings, Ty Lawson, Taj Gibson, DeMar DeRozan, and many other NBA studs.

Now I can’t put all the blame on Walsh not having LeBron come to New York. I felt that Walsh did everything he possibly could to persuade LeBron to join the Knicks. But nonetheless, Pat Riley got him to sign with Miami and Walsh failed at having the best basketball player of our generation come to New York. One of the main reasons why Walsh was brought in as GM was to work on having LeBron sign with the Knicks. Obviously this didn’t happen.

Even though I am pointing out the negatives during Walsh’s time as the Knicks’ GM, it’s hard to tell how much power Walsh had when it came to these decisions. For example, with the Carmelo trade, who knows if Dolan was breathing down Walsh’s neck to make a trade? During the LeBronathon, we know that Dolan had Isiah Thomas speak with LeBron about the Knicks. So overall, who really knows if Walsh had that much say in general? But now with Walsh out, let’s all pray to God that Isiah doesn’t make an infamous return to the Garden…

This entry was posted on June 4, 2011 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Knicks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.