talent is not and never has been the issue with the knicks. the issue has been do they have the right talent, and the right mix. isiah's biggest flaw, besides his utter inability to actually coach a team, was that he simply collected talent without worrying about wether or not that talent fit together.
marbury and randolph will eventually be gone. i'm very interested to see what duhon will do, and how crawford will respond to actually being coached. i always thought crawford was a guy who could flourish under the right system... heck, under A system. now we'll see.
as for d'antoni never doing well without talent... well, that's true in heindsight. steve nash was a very good player before he got to phoenix, but he didn't even make the all star team the year before winning back to back MVPs. and in that second MVP season he was not exactly surrounded by stellar talent, as stoudamire missed the entire season. now some of those guys phoenix had that year... your boris diaw's of the world... have become pseudo-stars, but at the time they certainly were not. they had nash and marion and what were then considered a bunch of spare parts... and they won 58 games in a brutal western conference.
do i expect the knicks to win 58 games? of course not. all i'm saying is that to say d'antoni has never won without great players is a little shortsided because frankly a lot of those great players became great players under his watch, and weren't considered to be great players before he got there.
