Steve Popper: Knicks are back mostly intact; this team was built for long haul

An email arrived in my inbox Thursday morning with a simple start.

“Hi Steve, do you ever roll your eyes at the numbers?”

And the answer  certainly is yes.

It’s not just that the contract numbers (and franchise valuations and gambling dollars flowing and . . . ) are so crazy that you roll your eyes. More important, on the eve of the Knicks beginning their defense of the NBA title, the last thing you want to think about is whether numbers that most fans can’t even imagine in their most fevered lottery dreams could provide a stumbling block to those championship dreams.

I’ll start by optimistically stating that I don’t believe the cash prizes earned by lifting the Larry O’Brien Trophy are going to split the team the Knicks put together. An ESPN report this week talked about the contract extension talks between Karl-Anthony Towns and the Knicks, putting a cloud over the team as it prepares for training camp. That just feels like someone who has never met Towns.

A league source told Newsday of the talks, “There have been plenty of conversations with KAT and his camp. Everything is positive. [The organization] loves him, thinks really highly of him. Just because the deal's not done doesn’t mean it’s not going to get done.”

Here’s the thing: The Knicks' front office built this team with a window to compete for a title, and even if the celebration already has been held, they still are in that window. Every member of the starting five is under contract for the upcoming season, including Towns. The key bench pieces are all under contract. The one piece they couldn’t hang onto was Mitchell Robinson. His injury history and role did not fit into the plans when he hit free agency and Robinson was handed a three-year, $47.4 million deal by the Celtics.

Now, it’s not quite as simple as that. Even highly paid players are people, and they understandably may turn an eye toward the next deal. And the parade hadn’t even begun when Madison Square Garden chairman James Dolan publicly stated that he couldn’t and wouldn’t let the payroll push into the second apron.

That last part is important because in franchise-building, flexibility should take a back seat to winning. The Knicks already have built a winner, so holding those pieces in place is more important than any restrictions imposed by the collective bargaining agreement.

The Knicks have dodged the second apron to this point, and that’s important because repeating as a second apron team carries harsher penalties.

But no Knicks fan, whether an elderly one who waited not so patiently for 53 years for a title or one who’d never seen a Knicks championship, wants to see the front office take the course that the Celtics did the last two offseasons, shipping off key pieces to reset their payroll. No one at a bargaining table wants to negotiate against themselves, but the Knicks are negotiating against history, buying high on anyone they choose to pay right now.

To hold all this together, the Knicks will face a payroll crunch in the coming years. It’s not only Towns who already is in talks about a contract extension; Josh Hart also is eligible for one now. After this coming season, Jalen Brunson can get an extension, and the money he left on the table to facilitate building this roster  leaves him deserving of getting all that he’s earned this time.

The good thing is that all of the players involved are the kind of people you’d want in your corner. Whether it’s Brunson, who already has shown leadership on and off the court, or Hart’s willingness to play a complementary piece to the more acclaimed starters, or Towns, who arrived in New York willingly taking the secondary role behind Brunson despite his own resume.

There has been no indication that, particularly after a summer of celebration, egos could break this apart. The players who ended this drought deserve everything they can get, but also, as the email began, the numbers make you roll your eyes.

Towns has a player option for the 2027-28 season worth $61 million. Can he drop that number down to $50 million as a starting point on a four-year extension that would have him finishing it up at 35 years old? That’s up to him, his family, his agency (yes, it is CAA. Knicks president Leon Rose started the basketball division and was Towns’ agent).

Does being home, being in New York, being in line for post-basketball careers, make up for signing for something short of the max? When the numbers are so crazy that the dollars at the back end of the deal couldn’t be spent for generations, it’s easy to say the players should make it work. And maybe they will. But no one tells the owners to make it work, for the NBA to bump the players' percentages or for the players' union to reconsider the CBA they agreed to that put teams in this spot.

The Knicks can make it work. But it’s also not a problem for right now. The problem right now is the 82 games in front of them and the playoffs as they  try to repeat.

Ready for action

It wasn’t exactly Willis Reed hobbling out of the tunnel for Game 7 in the 1970 NBA Finals, but when Brunson took the stage at The Roommates Show Block Party on Thursday night, he took the microphone and delivered the news the crowd really wanted.

“Hey, let’s break some news,” Brunson told the crowd. “As you guys know, I had surgery this offseason. Just want to tell you guys that I am fully cleared.”

The Knicks ran through the postseason with all of the pieces intact, and it wasn’t until it was over that Brunson acknowledged that he’d been playing with a tendon injury in his shooting hand and would undergo a surgical procedure to repair it. It should come as no surprise that the captain timed it to be back, but he said he is fully cleared to practice when camp starts this week.

The Knicks return nearly intact from last season's success, but they'll have to knock wood for equal health. Mikal Bridges played, as usual, every game. Towns played 75 games, Brunson 74, OG Anunoby 67 and Hart  66.