Leon Rose forged a career as a top basketball agent the old-fashioned way: he worked tirelessly, fueled by bottomless ambition, and built something out of nothing. He started with one client — a backup guard named Rick Brunson, who spent three of his nine seasons occupying the last seat on the Knicks bench.
Early on, he made the acquaintance of William Wesley — known across the basketball universe as World Wide Wes. Together they assembled a star-dappled roster of stars — Allen Iverson, LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, start there — and sold Rose’s practice to Creative Artists Agency in 2007, and under CAA’s flag Rose kept planting roots inside every patch of fertile basketball communities. Karl-Anthony Towns is his big fish now.
He takes over the Knicks now, and it is an out-of-the-box selection, and one that might even be widely praised if the track record of the man who hired him, James L. Dolan, wasn’t so besmirched. And look: until Dolan starts to get a thing or two right with the Knicks, there will only be worries about all he has done wrong.
I think this one will work out. Success in pro basketball, more than any other sport, is boiled down to simple, primal terms: talent. Presidents in other sports — baseball, football, hockey — have to be acutely conversant in organization building, in infrastructure, in top-down management. Basketball is simpler than that.
You start and you end with talent. You start and end with players. You start with assembling as many great players as you can. There is no camouflaging that. Stars win titles in the NBA, in far greater percentages than they do in other sports, because that’s where it all starts. Stars. Players. Talent.
And as an agent of the highest order, this is what Rose knows. This is what World Wide Wes knows, too, which is why it is little surprise that one of Rose’s first hires is to bring Wesley into the basketball operations fold. They have spent their professional lifetimes building relationships and earning the trust of the sport’s greatest assets — star players.
Immediately, that makes the Knicks a more attractive destination than they were Wednesday, than they were last week, than they have been in decades. Twenty-plus years of Dolan leadership and the relentless pileup of failed seasons lying in its wake have yielded a toxic shield at Penn Plaza, one Kevin Durant more than hinted at after choosing Brooklyn over Manhattan, one that has plagued the Knicks’ hopes at rebirth like an unrelenting miasma floating over the Garden.
Ideally, the most useful skills for a team president are the same ones that make for a successful agent: identifying talent, cultivating it, assembling it, servicing it. And the Knicks roster is in dire need of as much talent as it can attract, especially after losing Marcus Morris in a smart deadline-day deal with the Clippers on Thursday that brought a couple of extra draft picks to the team coffers.
Is this a no-brainer choice? It isn’t. Look, Bob Myers has worked out wonderfully with Golden State, going from an agent to an assistant GM to running the Warriors in one dizzying 13-month stretch in 2012. The record speaks for itself: three championship rings, two executive of the year awards.
Similarly, ex-agent Rob Pelinka has the Lakers at the top of the Western Conference this year, though he had a rocky beginning to his tenure and has certainly been helped along by LeBron James’ recruiting himself to Los Angeles thanks to his desire for a post-career life in Hollywood.
It is also impossible not to look to the Knicks’ orange-and-blue cousins in Queens, the Mets, and take a long look at what Brodie Van Wagenen — also a CAA alum — has done in little over a year with the Mets, a dossier that can best be described, so far, at best, as “uneven.”
It will take Knicks fans a while to give this move a fair shake, and that is absolutely as it should be. The credibility gap between the owner and the team’s fans has never been wider, and it is a chasm well earned by years of bad faith and bad choices. It was certainly an option to wait here, see if something could be worked out with the Raptors for Masai Ujiri or the Thunder with Sam Presti.
Instead, Dolan strikes quickly. He goes outside the envelope in a big way. It is certainly a fascinating choice. Is it the right one? I say yes. But only Leon Rose will be able to answer that one for sure. Stay tuned.
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