Mark Delaney: Juniper, hey — uh, I spent part of my week just trying to figure out why a team would trade away someone they're underpaying. Like, that feels like the wrong direction?
Juniper Vale: You're already there. That's exactly where we're going today — Miles McBride and the New York Knicks.
Mark Delaney: Because his salary is $3.96 million. Which, for a guy playing starting minutes as a two-way guard, is — I mean, that's nothing, right?
Juniper Vale: It's genuinely one of the best value contracts in the NBA. And James L. Edwards III — writing in The Athletic — said that without a preseason agreement, McBride leaving feels like the likely outcome based on history.
Mark Delaney: Wait, seriously? They'd trade the cheap guy?
Juniper Vale: Because the Knicks' committed payroll is already sitting at roughly $205 to $209 million — nine players — and they're only about $3.3 million under the second apron. McBride's salary is so low it barely closes that gap. So what do you actually gain by keeping him if you can't afford to re-sign him?
Mark Delaney: Oh. The bargain is too small to fix anything and too good to just give away.
Juniper Vale: That's the trap, yeah.
Mark Delaney: Okay but — wait, that's the part I keep getting stuck on. Like, imagine your landlord has you locked into rent that's way below market. That's great for you right now. But when the lease ends? They either pay market rate or watch you walk. And if they want to sell the building, nobody wants to buy just your unit because it's priced weird compared to everything around it. That's McBride's contract in a nutshell.
Juniper Vale: That's actually exactly right. The core issue is: his $3.96 million salary is so far below what he'd command as a free agent that salary-matching in a trade becomes structurally awkward. Any rival team can just — wait him out and offer him four times that in July.
Mark Delaney: So why didn't the Knicks just extend him before the deadline?
Juniper Vale: The reporting is genuinely a bit fuzzy on the timing. But here's what we know: they didn't extend him. And by not extending him before that deadline, they preserved his trade eligibility — which sounds smart — but it also left him heading into 2026-27 as a free agent after the season unless they get a preseason deal done.
Mark Delaney: Which James L. Edwards III at The Athletic basically said good luck with.
Juniper Vale: He said departure 'feels like' the likely outcome 'based on history.' Those were his words. And I mean — he covers this team. That's not a throwaway.
Mark Delaney: So the Knicks get — uh, they get a trade chip that's hard to trade, or a free agent they probably can't re-sign. That's a rough spot to have maneuvered yourself into.
Juniper Vale: And remember he signed that three-year, $13 million extension in December 2023 — right after the Barrett and Quickley trade cleared room for him in the rotation. That was the moment. The Knicks got a steal, and now the clock on that steal is almost up.
Mark Delaney: The discount ran out before they figured out what to do with it.
Juniper Vale: But the discount running out — that's actually the cleaner part of this problem. Here's what gets weird: even if Leon Rose trades McBride tomorrow, the Knicks are still staring at that second apron ceiling. Because picture him — it's late August, he's got the roster spreadsheet open — he moves McBride, pockets the $3.96 million, and the needle barely moves. Blake Silverman reported they're $3.3 million below the second apron with two roster spots still open. So you trade the guy, save almost exactly that margin, and you're still brushing the ceiling. Towns and Hart's numbers haven't changed at all.
Mark Delaney: Wait — so the math basically cancels itself out?
Juniper Vale: Almost exactly. And the Knicks have been so disciplined about this that they declined to add even a third-string center — a backup center — because of apron concerns. That's how tight the margin is. You're not adding a guy who'll play eight minutes a night because of a rule.
Mark Delaney: Man, that's — uh, that's a strange place to be. You're a championship-contending team and you can't fill out the bottom of your roster.
Juniper Vale: And meanwhile Towns has a $61 million player option sitting there for 2027-28. The Athletic raised this hypothetical — and I want to be clear it's a hypothetical, not a confirmed negotiation — of Towns taking a three-year, $135 million extension instead. That's about $45 million a year. Which would actually restructure some of this math. But none of that's resolved. So right now Leon Rose is juggling Towns's situation and Josh Hart — there's reportedly a big Hart decision coming fast too — and McBride is kind of caught in the middle of all of it.
Mark Delaney: The Hart thing — I didn't realize that was also active at the same time. That's a lot of fires.
Juniper Vale: Every one of those decisions affects the apron math, and the apron math affects every one of those decisions. It's circular. Which is — I mean, that's why McBride's cheap salary almost doesn't matter. It's not enough to create real room, but it's not zero either, so he's useful mainly as a trade chip rather than a cap solution.
Mark Delaney: Okay but — isn't that something? Like, a trade chip's not nothing. You package McBride, you get back something useful.
Juniper Vale: You'd think. But that's actually where this gets worse — and we'll get into why banking on McBride as a trade chip might leave the Knicks with nothing at all. Because there's a version of this where the chip expires in your hand.
Mark Delaney: The chip expires in your hand — okay, so walk me through what that actually looks like. Like, concretely.
Juniper Vale: Picture Leon Rose in October, training camp is running, and McBride is still on the roster — no extension done, no trade done. Every week that passes, his market value as a trade piece stays the same but his value to the Knicks keeps getting fuzzier. And if Towns doesn't restructure and Hart's deal doesn't come in under budget, the Knicks breach the second apron anyway. At that point McBride's gone and they still blew through the ceiling.
Mark Delaney: So they gave up a two-way starter and got — nothing. Not cap room, not a replacement.
Juniper Vale: And the backcourt replacement problem is real. Brunson, McBride, Alvarado — all listed at six-two or shorter. That's already one of the smallest backcourts in the league. You don't just swap in a body.
Mark Delaney: And the guys behind him are — uh, Landry Shamet and Tyler Kolek, right? I mean, that's not the same thing.
Juniper Vale: Not even close. McBride came in as the 36th pick in 2021 — a defensive specialist, basically a project. He built himself into a dependable two-way guard. Shamet and Kolek are fine depth pieces, but neither carries that profile.
Mark Delaney: Which — man, that's actually the human part of this that gets me. He did the work, earned the spot, and now the Knicks are keeping him in limbo because the numbers around him don't cooperate.
Juniper Vale: And that limbo has a cost. You know — at what point does 'we're keeping our options open' just become paralysis dressed up as strategy?
Mark Delaney: Yeah, and I don't — uh, I don't have a clean answer for that. But I think that's the question Leon Rose actually has to sit with.
Juniper Vale: And that's actually the part that matters in all of this. James L. Edwards III didn't say McBride is gone — he said it *feels like* the likely outcome based on history. That word 'feels' is doing a lot of work. The Knicks haven't made the move yet. But the $205 to $209 million sitting on nine players basically made the decision for them before they sat down to make it.
Mark Delaney: Yeah — and that's the part that kind of stuck with me through all of this. It looks like a choice. It might not be.
Juniper Vale: That's where I land too. Leon Rose can call it strategy. And maybe it is. But when your margin is $3.3 million under the apron and you still have two spots to fill — I mean, the math was always going to make this call, not the front office.
Mark Delaney: Uh — yeah. That's a rough thing to absorb, honestly. You build something real and then the ceiling just kind of... descends on you.
Juniper Vale: Good talk. I'm glad we actually sat in the discomfort of it rather than tidying it up.
