The more time you spend reading local sportswriters the easier it is to see which guys are doing their jobs well and independently and which guys are content to serve as mouthpieces for the teams they cover. They probably get more interviews, more "inside" content and whatnot but it really just adds up to pushing the party line so that the team can do PR with their readers at no cost to them.
Take Frank Isola of the Daily News, for example. He's obviously the go-to guy for Isiah Thomas among Knick beat writers. Rarely does a week go by, even in the offseason, when Isola doesn't write an article about all the boldfaced names that the Knicks are pursuing. Kevin Garnett's a popular one, Jermaine O'Neal pops up a lot and the only thing you can bank on is that any name mentioned in an Isola column has almost no chance of ever suiting up for the orange and blue. Only in Isiah's mind does the junkyard roster he's compiled stand a chance of landing such a player without eliminating any player of value from the roster. Hopefully that's the case with today's subject: Rasheed Wallace.
You can see where Isola's heart lies in his lede. "The ugly ending to Rasheed Wallace's season could be the start of something encouraging for the Knicks." Encouraging? How exactly is a 32-year old forward who prefers shooting three pointers and getting ejected to actually helping his team win games an encouraging addition to the Knicks? Isola writes that Thomas is in the market for a rugged power forward and sought Wallace when he was dealt to Atlanta and again when he moved to Detroit. "Thomas never got over losing Wallace to his former teammate, Pistons GM Joe Dumars, and has told associates that Wallace would have made the Knicks a perennial playoff team."
He's not wrong. When Wallace left Portland four years ago he was a game-changing power forward who was a key part of the Pistons title run. Since then, though, he's aged and his game has regressed back to the point where it's easier to lure him into a technical foul than it is to run a functional offense with him on the court. Don't forget how important Anderson Varejao's block of Wallace late in Game Five was in that series, that doesn't happen to your "rugged" types and it's hard to see where the Knicks would be a better team if they traded for another veteran who has two expensive years left on his contract.
Comments