This thinking cap has Walsh, Knicks squarely on right track

With the trade deadline in the rearview mirror, it was as good a time as any to check in with Knicks president Donnie Walsh on Monday for a status report on where he is with The Plan.

The Plan means something much different to Walsh than it does to me and every other writer/expert/fan/interested observer. To Walsh, everything is right where it needs to be. The Plan is as crystal clear as he ever could've hoped when he was hired in April 2008 to excavate the Knicks from the abyss.

Donnie Walsh said when he was introduced as Knicks president that building a team doesn't happen overnight. (Getty Images)

"We wanted to be competitive," Walsh said. "And the fastest way to get there was to go into the free-agent market. If you go into the draft, that takes too long. I've done that. That takes a minimum of four to seven years, because you have to factor in the development of the players."

The names come across Walsh's desk with regularity. LeBron. LeBron and Bosh. LeBron and Wade. Wade and Bosh. Wheeeeee! Walsh scoffs at the speculation.

"I haven't settled on one player," he said, "because I don't know who's going to be there."

The rest of the basketball world is already one step ahead of Walsh, with visions of a No. 23 LeBron James jersey hanging from the rafters at the Garden someday. But Walsh is nothing if not patient. He is doing what any responsible manager would do -- planning for the worst-case scenario. That means LeBron might be available to him on July 1, 2010, or not. It means that any team in cap-clearing mode should be operating under the assumption that LeBron, Dwyane Wade and maybe even Chris Bosh will sign extensions with their current teams this summer. The list of potential free agents -- including Amare Stoudemire, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, Yao Ming, plus a slew of restricted free agents whose situations will be affected by the uncertain economy -- is still long enough to make The Plan worth it.

Nobody knows what James, Wade or Bosh will do this summer or next; at this point, the players themselves don't know. But we can get a fairly accurate picture of where the Knicks stand in their quest to land one or more of them. Given all the factors -- team options on Wilson Chandler and Danilo Gallinari that will be picked up, and whether Walsh will be able to trade Eddy Curry ($11.3 million due in 2010-11), Jared Jeffries ($6.9 million) or both -- it's a moving target. Throw in the notion that the salary cap could come down in 2010-11 due to an expected drop in league-wide revenues next season, and the target is moving faster than Walsh or anyone else anticipated.

With four players under contract for 2010-11 -- Curry, Jeffries, Chandler, and Gallinari -- plus the league-mandated allowance of eight more spots computed at minimum salaries (about $750,000) for cap purposes -- the Knicks currently have $29 million committed to the '10-'11 cap. If David Lee and Nate Robinson -- both restricted free agents this summer -- re-sign with the Knicks, they would account for approximately $13.5 million more. (Lee likely will seek a deal averaging $10 million per season, while Robinson would command about half that. Subtract the two arbitrary minimum spots totaling $1.5 million to get the space they'd eat up.)

With Lee and Robinson on the team, and neither Curry nor Jeffries traded, the Knicks would have about $42.5 million committed to the '10-'11 cap. So right off the bat, if Walsh is confident he'll have enough room to sign one max free agent -- and he is -- then you know he's assuming at least one of those four players won't be on the team.

If the cap goes down from the current level of $58.7 million to an estimated $56 million -- the low end of estimates most league executives are operating under -- the Knicks would be $3.3 million shy of signing a max player whose first-year salary would be $16.8 million (30 percent of the cap). If somehow the cap went up to $60 million, the max player's first-year salary would go up, too -- to $18 million. In that case, the Knicks would be about $500,000 shy of the cap space needed.

One way or another, Walsh will find the room for one max player. But for Walsh to have any chance of landing two, he'd either have to 1) trade Curry and Jeffries, 2) trade or decline to match offer sheets for Lee and Robinson, or 3) some combination of the two.

Walsh declined to discuss specific players, but suffice to say he's amused by the speculation that his plan all along has been to sign two max players. He never said that. He wouldn't address the topic, though, beyond referring me to what he said the day he was hired. So while Walsh was paging through his payroll projections on the other end of the phone, I was going through my notes, too.

"I'm not the great new hope," Walsh said at his introductory news conference in New York last April 2. "I'm just a guy who's going to come in and try to create a team, and it's not going to happen overnight. So I don't want to create any illusions. But I think it has to get better right away. I think the people in this city are paying money to go to games and they've got to see a competitive team. And I think they have to see a team that makes sense, one that they can say, 'OK, this can get better.' There has to be a direction.

"I don't want anybody to be fooled. There's no magic wand here. It's going to take a lot of hard work on the part of the people in the front office, on the part of the players, and on the part of the people that are involved in the operation of the basketball part. ... You've got to focus on it and not act like you can just change everything overnight, but start making the right moves and get the thing in the right direction. That's what I want to do."

Before the season was a month old, Walsh made $27.4 million of 2010-11 cap-eating salary disappear by trading Zach Randolph and Jamal Crawford. Last week, he packaged one of the remnants of the Randolph trade -- Tim Thomas -- along with Jerome James and Anthony Roberson for Larry Hughes. Chris Wilcox came over from Oklahoma City for Malik Rose. Those two trades didn't impact one penny of '10-11 cap space and might even improve the team's chances of making the playoffs this season. Making the playoffs means more revenue and a lower first-round pick with a lower salary.

The Knicks' victory over the Pacers on Monday was their 24th of the season, surpassing their 23 wins in two of the past three. Whatever happens the rest of the way, Walsh can put his feet up on the desk. He's done, for now. Soon after he celebrates his one-year anniversary as the Knicks president, he'll file his tax returns and then start mapping out Phase 2 of The Plan. You don't have to know how it ends to see it has already been a success.

I have sort of a fun, running debate with one of my colleagues who's always needling me about how cap space doesn't show up in the box score. "Cap space never scored a point or got a rebound," he's always telling me. And I say, "Check the box scores in two years."