NY Knicks: Leon Rose comes up short in Executive of The Year race

For the first time in a long time, the NY Knicks are entering an offseason where the narratives around the team and organization are positive.

Coming off a playoff berth and entering the offseason with cap space, extra draft picks, a strong coaching staff and young talent on the roster is as good of a setup as any fan could have asked for. The success starts at the top of the organization – it starts with Leon Rose.

NY Knicks: Leon Rose has the organization in a prime spot

The NBA seems like an increasingly impatient league when it comes to winning. Finding the balance of being able to draft the top young talent while creating a winning environment is rare.

We’ve seen teams trade away entire their future in an attempt to immediately win and come up short. We’ve seen teams continuously produce losing season, acquire top prospects in the draft, and do absolutely nothing with it. The NY Knicks, somehow, someway, have been the middle of these losing trajectories for years now.

It has been a balance of drafting failed lottery picks while making trades and spending money on players who got them nowhere close to a championship. This is the environment Leon Rose inherited.

This is the toxic environment he threw in the trash can and replaced by spraying “competent culture” by Don Leon Rose cologne around the wafty old Madison Square Garden offices.

The NBA announced the Executive of The Year award yesterday and Leon Rose finished 4th in voting.

Rose finished behind Brooklyn’s Sean Marks, Utah’s Dennis Lindsey, and the winner, Phoenix’s James Jones. It seems like any time a player, coach, or executive wins an award, someone else was “robbed”.

James Jones was very deserving of the honors. Still, Knicks fans have to feel good about where Rose landed. The 3 executives above him coached the #2, #2, and #1 seeds in their conference.

It’s a testament to just how much Rose has done to revamp the NY Knicks franchise. For a long time, steering the Knicks in the right direction has felt like an insurmountable task.

Leon Rose has put his head down, gotten to work, and hired all of the right people in all of the right places. Part 2 of Don Leon Rose’s Knicks drops this summer. Stay tuned.