Amare Officially Signs with New York

After apparently being shunned by Lebron, Wade, and Bosh, the New York Knicks are attempting to save face by signing Amare Stoudemire (number 5 on the Big Board) to a 5 year, $100 million contract. I’m trying not to gloat here but… It makes me incredibly happy to see the Knicks, who have done absolutely nothing to make their team decent over the last 5 years, completely strike out on the franchise players this free agent class had to offer. I despise the way they have conducted business and how they put all their eggs into the Lebron basket. So now, desperate and backed into a corner, they’ve turned to Stoudemire with a deal that I guarantee they will regret. Don’t get me wrong, Stoudemire is a good player, an incredibly talented player, and a player coming off a career half season. What Stoudemire is not, however, is a franchise player or a guy you can build your team around. He can be your first scoring option but he feeds off of other players (like, say, Steve Nash) and doesn’t do ANYTHING to make his teammates better. He’s one of the laziest players in the league on defense, has a sketchy history with injury, and perhaps worst of all, he’s stopped improving. He’s not doing anything now that he wasn’t doing three years ago and in fact you could definitely make the case that since his knee injury, he’s not nearly as intimidating as he once was.

Now he’ll be paid as a franchise player in the harshest market in the league and his teammates will, for the most part, be substandard. Even if the Knicks manage to get another second tier star like Joe Johnson, this team is likely headed to the lottery, or at the very least, an early playoff exit. Stoudemire will give Knick fans something to get excited about but in the end he’s not going to be much better than David Lee, whom the Knicks let go in order to secure the cap space to go after Lebron. This isn’t quite spending money for the sake of spending money, Stoudemire just isn’t the type of guy who can lead a team to much of anything and they’ll now be paying him like he is. It’s a shame to see the way one of the NBA’s premiere franchises has gone down the crapper over the last decade. I seriously feel bad for Knick fans.

Grade: B-