The New York Knicks really want you to know that free agents didn’t reject them this summer. Immediately after Kevin Durant announced his decision to join the Brooklyn Nets, Ramona Shelburne of ESPN reported that the Knicks were not willing to offer him a max contract due to his torn Achilles tendon. When Richard Jefferson joked that the Knicks were the only team to offer him a contract prior to his retirement, the team took the extraordinary step of issuing an official statement from their PR Twitter account to deny that such a deal was offered.
Another such offseason fiction that made the rounds? The Knicks canceled a meeting with Kawhi Leonard because they weren’t prepared to wait for him. That was initially reported by Marc Berman of The New York Post, and while the Knicks never confirmed it directly, team president Steve Mills did say before the season that the Knicks could have met with superstar free agent but chose not to. On Saturday, however, Leonard denied that such a meeting was ever scheduled.
“I never said I was considering going to the Knicks,” Leonard said ahead of Sunday’s game between the Knicks and his Los Angeles Clippers. “Everybody knows where I wanted to go when I requested a trade so I don’t where that came from.”
Considering the conflicting stories here, there are two possibilities at play here. Theoretically, Leonard could be lying. It wouldn’t exactly look great for a player to be denied a meeting with the lowly Knicks, after all, but it’s not like Leonard lacked suitors. He could have signed with any team he’d wanted, and was so desirable last summer that he managed to paralyze the Lakers for a full week while he made up his mind. He is the reigning Finals MVP. He doesn’t need to think about his image in comparison to the Knicks. It’s a battle he’d win every time.
And then there is the far likelier truth: this is PR spin from an organization that just can’t help itself. A normal team enduring as embarrassing a summer and subsequent season as the Knicks would simply stay quiet. That has never been this team’s style, though. They just have to have the last word, and so they leak rumors like this that few would actually believe in an effort to save face that has already been lost.
If the Knicks want good PR, they can earn it through wise management and incremental on-court improvement. The more they insist that everything is fine, the more vulnerable they are to players like Leonard insisting that isn’t true.
