Moving Day?

Since I'm on the West Coast, and it's already Wednesday back East, I wanted to get this post up, because, frankly, things could happen before I wake up in LA tomorrow. With Free Agency starting for the NBA at Midnight, and for the NHL at noon on Thursday teams will be trying like crazy to get under their leaguewide caps in the hours leading up to free agency.

For the Knicks this means unloading Eddy Curry and his 11M dollar expiring contract. It's funny that there is this random sentiment that Curry's contract should be hard to move, because he doesn't play a lot. People don't seem to realize expiring contracts get moved all of the time, and it has almost nothing to do with the players under contract. It's a guarantee of future cap space. And since the Knicks are now under the cap, they are not tied to that dollar for dollar match trade formula that they were slaves to for about a decade. They can do all sorts of things, including using Eddy's deal in a sign and trade for one of the better players they do want. Now you hear people saying they'd have to add Gallo to trade Curry. Nonsense. Unless a really premiere player like LeBron himself or Chris Paul or someone is coming back, trading Gallo cannot be justified. Trading Wilson Chandler can be. So we'll see if Curry goes today (Wednesday) to create cap room going into FA, or is used in a sign and trade to get a third player to go along with LeBron and the Bosh or Amar'e or Dirk, or if they hold onto him until the trade deadline, or just let him expire. It's sort of all good, but their preference seems to be to move him now.

For the Rangers, the man marked for movement is Michal Rozsival. Rozsival has two years left at 5 per, and moving him would would create an even greater cushion for their pursuit of Kovalchuk and others. I'm sure they'd also like to move Chris Drury, who makes even more, but he has a no movement clause, and has fallen off a cliff skillswise since signing with the Rangers. They'd also like to move Wade Redden, but it looks like they'll be biting the bullet and waiving him. Last June 30th the Rangers traded Scott Gomez, this June 30th will it be Michal Rozsival?

It's a big day for both teams and many teams around the league before the real (but mostly staged) craziness begins on Thursday. I have to think that will all of time the Knicks and Rangers have had to put into their respective plans and trades, they will both have come up with nice options. Go Knicks and Rangers!