Leon Rose, Knicks need to take a big swing on Zion Williamson if he becomes available – The Denver Post

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, who knows stuff, says that the Pelicans never made Zion Williamson available in the run-up to the NBA Draft, as part of a possible deal for Scoot Henderson or anybody else. But that doesn’t mean that they won’t make Williamson, who sometimes seems to carry more baggage than his actual weight, available at some point this summer.

If they do, the Knicks have to think about taking a big swing on Williamson, with all the big risk that goes with a play like that. Leon Rose — he runs the Knicks even if you never see him or hear from him — absolutely has to consider taking a chance here, or start wondering how long the team he has brought back to respectability will remain stuck in the middle.

We all know how low the bar was set for Rose at James L. Dolan’s Madison Square Garden. But the object of the game isn’t supposed to be respectability. It’s supposed to be the Knicks winning their first championship in half-a-century, or at least making it back to the NBA Finals for the first time in a quarter-century. Rose’s Knicks did win a playoff series this season, the first in a decade. So did Glen Grunwald’s, back in the spring of 2013.

Rose gets all the props in the world for bringing Jalen Brunson to the Knicks, and watching Brunson become not just their best player, but the best free agent acquisition they’ve ever had. But now Brunson needs a partner. It’s not Julius Randle. And maybe you think RJ Barrett, Zion’s old teammate at Duke, is going to get a lot better, as young as he is. I don’t.

Barrett still has upside. Not nearly as much as Zion has. Despite the baggage.

Of course it is easier to make the case of why the Knicks should not go anywhere near the guy. If this is a debate, it’s a lot easier to be on the side that says leave him in New Orleans, or let some other team take on the risk. Everybody knows how many games Williamson has missed in his NBA career because of injuries; and how he’s never seemed to be in top shape when he was healthy. In so many ways, he has been a classic, modern case of someone declared to be a superstar even having not put nearly enough points on the board. The last time he played a full season was at Duke.

In Zion’s three seasons in the league, he has played 114 regular season games out of a total of 246 for the Pelicans. He is the Giancarlo Stanton of the NBA. Or Stanton the Yankee has been the Zion of major league baseball. But there was a time when we thought Aaron Judge — at least before the suffered the worst case of stubbed toe in recent baseball history — was never going to stay on the field for a full season. But then Judge sure did.

I’m not saying that Zion is that kind of talent in his sport, with that kind of upside. But when he has been healthy in New Orleans, he made his team look like a contender. When he has been on the court, he’s been good for 26 or 27 points a game and around seven rebounds. More than that, he has been the type of exciting player who makes people want to buy a ticket to watch him play basketball.

Might he be on his way to being a career chucklehead off the court? Sure. Ja Morant has a world of talent himself, and at his best has looked like a generational player for the Grizzlies. Then he started to play with guns. Williamson hasn’t gotten into that kind of trouble. His difficulties, according to what we’ve been reading lately, mostly seem to involve porn stars. Maybe he wants to be president someday.

But as a Knicks fan I know, one who very much wants Zion to come play for his team, said to me on Friday, “I think the porn star thing is something he might be able to work on.”

Might Zion come here and miss 100 games over the next couple of years? Yeah, he night. Might the city designated officially as the one that never sleeps be too much for him? Oh my, yes. Or Zion might wake up next month on the morning of his 23rd birthday, because that’s all he is, and decide that he wants to be a fulltime basketball star again, one worthy of his own skills, not just another modern celebrity who observes his own life on social media like it’s a different kind of porn.

Leon Rose can gamble on somebody like Zion, or he can sit back and gamble that the day will come when Luka is the one who wakes up one morning and doesn’t want to work for Mark Cuban any longer. Or Joel Embiid will figure out that the title the 76ers won with Dr. J and Moses Malone is the last one they’re going to win in the next half-century.

We heard the same thing with Rose when he was on his way in the door at the Garden that we heard about Steve Mills once: Heard about all his relationships in the league. All his connections. And Rose, a former hotshot CAA agent, was supposed to have much better connections than Mills. Now it turns out that the only connection that has really mattered is that Jalen Brunson’s dad was a Knick once, and the kid grew up at the Garden.

As soft as the Cavaliers looked against the Knicks in the first round, they’re young and they’re going to get better. If Kristaps Porzingis stays healthy, and he did for the Wizards last season, the Celtics just got a lot better. You know who else got better on draft night? The Heat did when they drafted Jaime Jaquez Jr. out of UCLA. If you saw Jaquez play in college, you know how well he is going to fit in with the players the Heat already have.

The Knicks? You know what the Knicks did Thursday night. They continued to stockpile Toppin brothers. That ought to scare the rest of the Atlantic Division.

The Knicks were a good team last season, better than we thought they were going to be. Just not good enough to make it past the second round of the playoffs for the first time since 2000. They were a tough out. The Heat were tougher, on their way back to the NBA Finals.

One of these days, Zion is going to show up big, and remind everybody why the Knicks were so desperate to get him when he came out of Duke. If it’s not going to happen in New Orleans, why shouldn’t it be here? I don’t know what the Pelicans might want for him. Leon Rose ought to find out.

HAL REALLY LOVES THIS YANKEE LEADERSHIP, METS HEADING TO AMAZIN’ DISASTER & RORY DIDN’T CHOKE …

There is no more tired narrative in town than the one where people nearly get weepy hoping, even against all hope, that Hal Steinbrenner might someday be a little more like his father.

Yankee fans need to understand something:

I’m sure Hal does want to win, maybe just so people will leave him alone.

But he likes things the way they are at Yankee Stadium.

If his general manager, Brian Cashman, had his own baseball card, Hal would carry it around the way Bob Costas used to carry around his Mickey Mantle card.

Hal likes Brian a lot, to the point where you sometimes get the idea that he’s working for him, and not the other way around.

Hal likes his manager.

But if he honestly doesn’t understand why his fans are upset with all of them, then he needs a much better understanding of the team which has him as its caretaker, and the market in which that team plays.

And if his team doesn’t at least make it to the World Series this year, that will make it 14 seasons since 2009.

Which will make it one season shy of the 15 the Yankees went without making it to your Fall Classic between 1981 and 1996.

As for the team on the other side of town?

Since the Mets were 14-7, they were only seven games better than the Oakland A’s in the standings coming into the weekend.

And the A’s didn’t even try to field a representative team this season.

The Mets also came into the weekend a lot closer to last place than first place.

They have a couple of weeks before the All-Star Break to maybe not look as if they are on their way to being one of the great financial disasters in the history of sports in New York.

Funny, though, how only getting one good start a week out of your pitchers can put you in this kind of hole.

By the way?

The Yankees started three guys on Thursday night against the Mariners — Stanton, Donaldson, Volpe — hitting under .200.  

My pal Stanton is willing to start a grassroots campaign to get Dalvin Cook to the Jets.

The Jets must be so terribly, awfully pleased when they see Aaron Rodgers addressing the subject of psychedelics.

Only the dumbest corners of social media — hi there, you LIV Golf people — described what happened to Rory McIlroy last weekend at Los Angeles Country Club as some kind of choke job.

The winner, Wyndham Clark, shot 70 in the final round.

Scottie Scheffler shot 70.

Rory shot 70.

Yeah, it was practically Nick Faldo putting Greg Norman on his knees that time at Augusta.

I wouldn’t believe Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. if he told me water was wet.

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