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D'Antoni must remember money can't buy wins

Ken Berger

May 14, 2008

Mike D'Antoni strolled outside the Garden yesterday afternoon, working the Seventh Avenue end on a brilliant New York day flanked by photographers and the usual MSG gatekeepers. He was all smiles on Day 1 as coach of the Knicks, posing for photos with the former home of basketball greatness lurking over his shoulder.

"Playoffs, playoffs!" a fan shouted in D'Antoni's direction, offering a thumbs-up to go with the ultimatum. "We need the playoffs!"

So does D'Antoni. The obvious questions are, how bad -- and how soon -- does he need them?

If you can excuse Knicks president Donnie Walsh for slipping up and introducing the new coach as "D'Antonio" yesterday, everyone said all the right things. They always do on days like this.

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D'Antoni said he'll adjust to the roster. Walsh all but swore that he won't botch it up with more bad contracts. That way, he'll be able to follow through on his promise to get the Knicks under the salary cap by 2010 and make a serious run at unrestricted free agent LeBron James.

Hiring D'Antoni might be the easiest decision Walsh will make as long as he has this job. The harder choices begin now, and they're the same ones Scott Layden and Isiah Thomas had to grapple with once all the warmth and fuzziness and Seventh Avenue photo ops were over for them.

The true test will be whether Walsh and D'Antoni can avoid the same di$ea$e that eventually infected Layden and struck a fatal blow to Thomas. MSG-itis has long incapacitated previously intelligent basketball men and intoxicated them with the notion that unlimited resources lead to winning.

They deserve the benefit of the doubt. But I'd just like to point out one troubling sign that has jumped out at me in the days since D'Antoni's four-year, $24-million deal was consummated Saturday.

One of the key reasons D'Antoni has given dubious confidants for why he said yes to the Knicks was that pesky little word again: "resources." Layden and Thomas had the same resources, and look what happened to them.

"It's how wisely you spend those resources," a person close to D'Antoni said yesterday, before unwittingly making my point for me. "Obviously, the next regime always thinks they're smarter than the last one."

Larry Brown, a Hall of Fame coach, won 23 games here with unlimited resources. So did Thomas, a Hall of Fame player who made the playoffs three straight years coaching for Walsh in Indiana. And so it goes. We will find out during the next two years just how smart and resistant to risorse illimitato D'Antoni and Walsh really are.

"There's a lot of cities littered with people who have failed," D'Antoni said. "That's not just New York."

But if you include future draft picks and options to be picked up on the few players D'Antoni would want to keep around that long - including Renaldo Balkman and Wilson Chandler - the Knicks could have at least $46 million committed to the cap in 2010 (aka the Summer of LeBron). With the cap projected to be about $60 million that year, and with the max deal for LeBron figuring to average $20 million per season, that means Walsh and D'Antoni need to shave at least $6 million off that figure; more if they'd like to have enough players to run a layup drill.

"What we don't want to do is add money down the road," Walsh said.

It is an enormous task, though not impossible as long as Walsh sticks to his plan. That means he and D'Antoni cannot drink from the same poisonous concoction that turned Thomas into a chronic spender who tore up the blueprint every time the next Steve Francis or Zach Randolph came along.

It is interesting to note that Thomas' first ill-advised move involved Stephon Marbury. If Walsh and D'Antoni know what they're doing, one of their first moves also will involve Marbury. The right move is to buy him out and reap the cap savings in July '09.

But if they trade Marbury's expiring contract for more long-term money, D'Antoni will be coaching LeBron only with Team USA - not in the building he was posing next to yesterday, a day filled with optimism and the distinct feeling of, excuse my French, coach D'Antonio, deja vu.