HALLELUKA: Luka Clinches All-NBA 1st team. 4th in 5 years

[Jym]

Keep seeing people talking about Kyrie and his ball dominance and comparisons with Brunson, and it just being the same thing with Kyrie being a better scorer. It's just not the case, and I posted about this in another thread. Now the defensive concerns are absolutely valid, but Kyrie is a much better fit with Luka offensively, not purely because Kyrie is a better player and scorer, but because his production is not suppressed playing off ball, which is the case with Brunson who is one of the most ball dominant players in the league this season. If Brunson was still here his numbers would look pretty similar to last season, and nothing like what he's doing in NYK. That's a huge difference compared to Kyrie who should maintain his production even playing with the current iteration of Luka who leads the league in TOP (Kyrie's TOP numbers with the Nets are basically what Dinwiddie's were playing next to Luka).

"Brunson is putting up his current stats ranking 3rd in the NBA in time of possession (behind Luka and Harden), and 4th in dribbles per possession. Kyrie on the other hand is producing close to career best numbers ranked 23rd in time of possession, and 78th in dribbles per possession. He ranks slightly below Steph Curry in both these rankings this year. Both Brunson and Dinwiddie are ball pounders who produce more having much more of the ball, their numbers are suppressed without it. Kyrie for all the talk, isn't. That's actually pretty relevant when talking about whether Brunson would be able to do anything close to what he's currently doing in NYK with Luka if he was still around or if he would have been an equal fit to what Luka and Kyrie might do together moving forward."

With all that said, I would rather lock in Brunson for 5 years between $150 to 175 million than get Kyrie and his unpredictably at 4 years $200+ million 
Just insane to me we didn't throw a solid 5 year offer at Brunson that the Knicks couldn't match. Especially now after seeing that Cuban is indeed willing to spend 52milion in luxury tax alone this year. Letting him walk for nothing made way more sense to me when I thought we would dump salary to eliminate as much of the tax bill as possible. Understandable if you're going to live the life of a no tax/low tax poverty team. 
Completely unjustifiable to me on a player evaluation standpoint when the budget is actually there