What has Donnie Walsh Really Done So Far?

Donnie Walsh was supposed to be brought into the Knicks organization as a savior.  He was supposed to cleanup Isiah’s mess and turn the team into winners.  He was brought in to appease Knicks fans and give the franchise hope.  Lets take a look at what he has done in the one year and four months that he has been the president of basketball operations of the team.  

Walsh’s first area of business was hiring a new head coach and he lured in ex-Sun’s coach Mike D’Antoni and his explosive seven seconds or less offense.  This was Donnie’s first move and it was a great one.  D’Antoni comes with a pretty good resume and playoff experience.  

This is to the extent in which Walsh has proved he is worth all the hype.  Since then, he has done minimal to improve the Knicks.  I know he has been able to let go of some dead weight and regain some financial flexibility but he hasn’t improved the talent on the team.  You can say he is positioning the team to make a splash in next year’s free agency but what if he isn’t able to land an elite player in 2010?  Then what?  All of this dumping of salary is great but if the Knicks don’t use the money on superstars, then they are going to be stuck as a mediocre team because those elite free agents will turn teams into contenders. 

The players that Walsh was able to acquire so far are guys like Chris Duhon, Darko Milicic, and Larry Hughes.  There’s no elite talent there.  He drafted decent players (Gallinari and Hill), but no elite players (yet anyway).  Walsh hasn’t done anything extraordinary and I believe the job he has done so far could have been done by other guys.  It’s what he does next summer that will show us if he really is the great basketball savior we all expected.   

Donnie Walsh has a lot of work to do and this summer has been terrible  Other than the draft, he has done nothing to improve the talent on the team.  He has tried.  He put out some offers to veterans but nothing has panned out.  Hopefully Donnie can put a team on the court that will play well in 2009-10 and hopefully he can land a superstar in free agency next summer.