AL Harrington is a productive player with an expiring contract worth $10,026,875. In NBA currency, that’s pure gold.
“It’s a business,” Harrington said, shrugging early last night while stuffing 13 tickets in envelopes for families and friends. “Right now, I’m a Knick and that’s what I want to be in the future.
“I wake up every day with that same attitude. Plus, I don’t read the papers so I don’t hear about a lot of this stuff.”
The same blinders Harrington wears to avoid the distraction of open teammates, he apparently takes to the newsstand, which recently has been filled with papers filled with rumbles of the Knicks’ interest in Tracy McGrady.
Insisting otherwise, Harrington and the Knicks certainly played distracted as they allowed 60 Nets points in the paint on New Jersey’s way to only its third win of the season, 104-95 last night at the Meadowlands.
“I would think he’s not done yet,” said rumor enabler Mike D’Antoni. “It’s an intriguing thing that will be evaluated in depth.”
The complications, however, run deeper than even Jim Dolan’s pockets. To take on the pro-rated $23 million base of a player in a stalled comeback from microfracture knee surgery, the Knicks, a team over the cap, would have to move the same contract value to the Rockets. That would mean a lot more than Harrington’s $10 million, like Larry Hughes’s expiring $13 million, too.
This sounds like the best possible match, outside of a Rockets’ buyout of McGrady.
Eddy Curry’s $10.5 million and Jared Jeffries’ $6.46 million on contracts that will come off the cap a season after LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and Joe Johnson are already conceivably in new homes, aren’t going to get a deal done, not unless the Knicks and Rockets can involve a third team, a contender seeing Jeffries’ value as a stopper.
Still, how far ahead would any deal put the Knicks for this year and beyond? A healthy McGrady is a better player than Harrington, who put up 25 last night on 10-for-19 shooting while turning the ball over five times. But while a rusted McGrady uses three-plus months in New York to build value for his own upcoming free agency, will he provide tangible help towards the playoffs?
Of course, the Knicks could re-sign McGrady this summer, provided they didn’t get James, Wade, Bosh or Johnson. Already 30, McGrady would have to work off a lot of rust to become a priority or even, in the interim, to equal Harrington’s 19.5 points a game.
Harrington has a hard time passing up shots, but doesn’t dominate the ball like a McGrady. T-Mac would necessitate a change in a Knicks M.O. that, notwithstanding last night’s predictable defensive snooze after a dominating win 24 hours earlier in Detroit, has generated a 9-6 surge of respectability.
The Knicks, still only 12-20, aren’t that good that they can let an opponent shoot 51 percent or leave any stones unturned toward improvement.
But as McGrady’s agent, Arn Tellem, told the Post’s Marc Berman yesterday, extricating McGrady is going to take some time, which may mean the Rockets find trading options so bad, a buyout makes most sense. Indeed, to make McGrady a good fit for the Knicks, Houston is going to have to throw in a power shoehorn.