After the first and second posts of this series, what we now need to do is begin to evaluate the playing staff of the Knicks, and look at which players are going to be the key building blocks moving forward, and who is going to get playing time this season. As I said in the previous update, one of my major focuses this season and moving forward is going to be the development of young players I’ve either signed/traded for, or drafted. This approach will clearly affect who I give minutes to this year, rather than simply just start the ‘best’ players with the highest ratings on the team. This is a long term plan and for that reason, I need to play players who either have room to grow into foundation pieces for us, or players who need to prove whether they are going to remain with us. In this update, I’m not going to run down every single player under contract at the Knicks (there’s a fair few players who just won’t get playing time), but I will discuss the major players.
The first player I want to talk about – quite rightly – is Kristaps Porzingis. Porzingis is a 7″3′ big man, with the ability to score from anywhere on the court, and has the potential to be an offensive freak – even more than he already is. I’ve already stated that I won’t be trading Porzingis as the Knicks did in real life – he’s coming up to being an unrestricted free agent – because I’m not looking to suddenly jump to being a superteam by signing KD and Kyrie. My main question is whether to play him at the 4 (Power Forward) or the 5 (Center), and I’m going to test this by giving him a month at each position at the start of the season, before then evaluating his performance at both positions and the impact this had, before planning our moves around Kristaps moving forward.