Kentucky Wildcats Basketball: Why WOULD John Calipari take the Knicks job?

It’s summertime and that means that the John Calipari to the NBA rumors are in full swing right about now.  The latest team to supposedly be ready to pluck John Calipari from the Wildcats is the New York Knicks.  As we know, the Knicks appear to be an up and coming team with Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudamire locked up for the next few years.  And according to other bloggers familiar with Knick’s owner James Dolan, Calipari’s ties with the CAA can make him an attractive candidate for Dolan:

"Names like former Portland Trail Blazers executive Kevin Pritchard and former New Orleans Hornets GM Jeff Bowers have already been floated as possible replacements, but if I know James Dolan (and after 24 years as a Knicks fan, I think I do), he’ll hire somebody with close ties to Creative Artists Agency. CAA represents Carmelo Anthony, Allan Houston, Mark Warkentien and John Calipari, among many others—including the man Dolan privately blamed Donnie Walsh for “losing,” LeBron James."

If you read on, the author of that article goes into more detail into Dolan’s relationship with former Knick’s GM  Donnie Walsh and it seems that the NY job is not going to be that attractive for a new GM, which Calipari is rumored to be interested in being:

"What Dolan has managed to do is turn an attractive job opening into an unattractive one, simply by re-asserting his authority. When he hired Walsh at David Stern’s suggestion after finally letting go of Isiah Thomas in 2008, it was with the promise of complete autonomy over all basketball decisions. While that did indeed seem to be the case for the first two years of Walsh’s tenure as he slowly, surely cleared salary cap space for the summer of 2010 by trading nearly all of the terrible contracts absorbed by Thomas, it was not always true in the last year or so. Last July and again this February, Dolan took a little of that autonomy away from the man who had resurrected his franchise from the dead. In July, he dispatched Isiah Thomas to Ohio to meet with LeBron and his reps in an unofficial capacity as a representative of the Knicks. After being unable to meet with LeBron and instead only securing a meeting with one of his many handlers, Thomas came back empty-handed.In February, while Walsh was patiently waiting out new Denver Nuggets general manager Masai Ujiri in the hopes he would finally cave in and trade Carmelo Anthony to the Knicks at his price, Dolan again interfered. He flew to Los Angeles over the All-Star break and proceeded to give up much more than Walsh would have in the deal.And now, while they were supposedly working on a two-year extension for Walsh, instead Dolan was insisting that Walsh take either a 40 percent pay-cut, cede complete autonomy of basketball decisions and be less forthcoming with the media than he already was. All three of these demands are patently ridiculous in and of themselves, considering the job Walsh had done in his three years in New York, but combined they put him over the top and led to him stepping down as president and general manager effective June 30."

Now ask yourself:  Does this sound like an owner that John Calipari would work for?  Calipari can basically name his terms with a new job at this point and this does not sound like an appealing situation at all for Calipari.

And let’s not forget that John Calipari has the top ranked class coming in and depending on what happens with the NBA collective bargaining agreement, could have them locked up in Lexington for two seasons.

Trust me, John Calipari may eventually depart Lexington for the NBA, but it will not be until he has hung at least one banner in the Rupp Arena rafters and maybe even two.  Kentucky is one of the top two teams coming into next season, and if the NBA rules that high school players will have to wait two seasons before entering the NBA draft, there will be a NCAA Title hanging in Rupp within the next two years.

Cal may go to the NBA eventually.  But not now.  It’s about to get really fun in Lexington and Calipari is not going to let another coach hang his banner with the team he put together.

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