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A couple of thoughts now that Donnie Walsh is running the Knicks.
The first is that this is very good for the NBA, and for basketball fans. A hint of what the league can be like has been given with the revival of the Celtics and Lakers as championship contenders. This is nothing against New Orleans or Cleveland or even Toronto, but a sport is lifted when its iconic franchise thrive.
Define iconic as you feel fit, but most observers would tell you that the reason baseball has done so well despite a blizzard of bad news regarding its greatest chemists is that the Yankees and the Red Sox are in a rivalry that basically holds most of the eastern seaboard in rapture and can't help but drag in the more casual fan elsewhere.
Blue Jays games against the Yankees or Red Sox are a more exciting prospect because even an average fan knows something about the players involved and the storylines are there for the following. A sports fan can get into that pretty easily. It takes a baseball fan to get excited about the Blue Jays and Kansas City Royals, and how many of those are there, really.
The Knicks are a storied brand that has been dragged through manure, basically, for nearly a decade. Hiring Walsh – and more importantly – giving him the autonomy to build the franchise the way he sees fit vastly increases the chances of the Knicks becoming a team people talk about for the right reasons. It won't happen over night, but it's not necessarily going to take another 10 years to get there. And when they get close you know the Knicks will have the money to spend to add those extra pieces, whatever the cost. And when that happens the buzz in the league builds and it becomes more fun to be a basketball fan, plain and simple.
As for the Raptors things will continue to get more challenging. It was only last year these guys were the champions of the Titanic Division. Boston seemed lost; Philly even more so; the Knicks were worst of all and the Nets' window was closing by the day. Some luck and some progress and it wasn't hard to imagine a long string of Atlantic Division banners hanging at the Air Canada Centre. And while an Atlantic Division banner is a long way from a conference title, let alone an NBA Championship, you could do worse for building blocks with a young team.
Now the Raptors are full of question marks. Andrea Bargnani has given scant and sporadic evidence that he's going to be a home-grown all-star that would compliment Chris Bosh as part of a dynamic and gifted young front court; it's hard to call T.J. Ford a building block, and while Jose Calderon has had an impressive season his recent swoon doesn't inspire confidence that his 40-game surge be maintained over 80 games as a 35-minute-a-night.
And the now the Titanic is rising. Boston looks poised for another year or two of dominance; Philadelphia is the hot, young surprise team this year with cap space for the summer; the Nets remain a question mark but rumours that when they move to Brooklyn in 2009 LeBron will join them won't go away and now the Knicks seem to have finally pulled their head out of their a****,[amp]nbsp; and hired a proven executive and given him the power to do his job.
This is good for the NBA; not so good for the Raptors, unless you like competition.
