Mikal Bridges is coming and OG Anunoby is back, but there’s still one big piece of the Knicks puzzle left to solve: Isaiah Hartenstein.
The big man was a key player down the stretch and in the playoffs, but their moves already mean the max deal the Knicks can offer Hartenstein is four years and $72.5 million – much less than he could possibly get, both in years and dollars, from another team with more cap space.
Will he choose to sacrifice the money to stay here, where he blossomed, or take his chance to cash in?
“As it sits right now, that’s the max they can give him because of where they are,” Boomer said. “He can get significantly more money, but the interesting thing about this is that the Knicks did trade one of their first-round picks, and the reason a lot of people think they did that is because they wanted to save money and not add that salary to their books – but you still have to make some other moves, and then maybe you could secure more money to keep Isaiah. There’s still a lot left to sort out, but from a Knocks perspective, you have to do everything you possibly can to try to keep him here.”
Boomer wondered if maybe moving on from some of the back end of the roster would be a way to facilitate that, and to Gio, that (and maybe moving on from Mitchell Robinson) is the right idea.
“Keeping Hartenstein to me is gonna be difficult because of the way he played, and there's going to be a team out there that's gonna offer him more money,” Gio said. “Now, is it gonna be significantly more at a place he doesn’t want to play, where he says he’s okay with not having that extra money because he wants to be here and build something special? How high does it go?”
Boomer thinks the ‘little things’ outweigh Hartenstein’s offensive limitations, and, yeah, maybe it’s a case where he makes the whole better than the sum of its parts.
“He is that perfect piece for a team where you don't have to pay him a lot of money, and he overplays his contract with his hustle and his minutes and all the things that he does well,” Gio said. “The Knicks hit on him at the perfect time in his career; they've essentially paid him nothing in the grand scheme of NBA salaries, and he was one of the most important players on the team in the biggest games they had last year.”
“That’s my point: he has played himself into a big raise, and then the question is, how much more is somebody going to offer him?” Boomer replied. “Maybe there’s a way for the Knicks to manipulate more cash for him, but this is his moment to make it big for himself and his family. You gotta take care of that first and foremost, but I imagine he likes playing here; I think he likes this team and the team loves him, and I know the fans love him and I think we all want to keep him. The question is, can they find more money to keep him?”
Gio thinks ‘it sounds like they’re doing everything that they can within their control of this to keep him,’ but ‘not everything you wanna do in an offseason always works out.’
But you’re saying there’s a chance?
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