The NBA Draft is just a day away and that means you can barely turn your head without seeing someone report some possible trade that will shake up the league.
Josh Smith from Atlanta to Orlando is in this corner, Steve Nash going a million places (including the Knicks, although Phoenix denies it all) is over here and that's just the tip of the iceberg. In most years, all of the innuendo and rumor mongering would have reached the point of being maddening background noise that can't go away soon enough.
This isn't most years, though, and we're holding onto all of the conjecture as tightly as a newborn grasps a parent's finger. Once the draft ends, basketball is going to go away and it is looking like quite a while before it will come back.
The NBA and the players met for a long time Tuesday, but emerged no closer to an agreement that would bring a swift end to the lockout. Chris Sheridan of ESPN.com does a fine job of breaking down the issues, with the key points being that the league and players are far apart when it comes to how much less money will be paid in salaries and the structure of the salary cap in years to come.
It doesn't take a master's degree in economics to figure out that those are the two biggest issues involved in any collective bargaining agreement. As such, we're going to have to hear a lot about those things and very little about the moves the Knicks are going to make toward being a better team.
On that front, we've had a bit of movement on the mock draft front since we last checked in on the way the draft winds were blowing. The big name to know at the moment is Iman Shumpert of Georgia Tech.
Shumpert is a point guard with great size and a rep for being a very strong perimeter defender. He's the choice of Chad Ford from ESPN.com as well as the folks from ProBasketballDraft.com and the selection makes sense as it fills two big Knicks needs at the same time.
Local
Elsewhere the names remain familiar ones from the last few weeks -- Marshon Brooks, Markieff Morris, longshot dreams of Jimmer Fredette and Bismack Biyombo -- so you probably just need to study up on Shumpert. If any of these trade whispers come to fruition, however, the whole thing will get thrown into disarray so you might as well just wait until after the draft to bone up on the newest Knick.
After all, its not like you're going to need the time for anything else.
Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City. You can follow him on Twitter and he is also a contributor to Pro Football Talk.
