William Wesley’s long road to the Knicks
“Everybody wants to make the quick nickel; nobody wants to make the slow dime.”
BY HENRY ABBOTT
The Knicks are reportedly close to signing agent Leon Rose to run the team. He goes way back with plugged-in insider William Wesley; Knick fans hope that’ll give them a leg up in attracting big-name free agents to New York.
That last sentence embodies Knick fans’ biggest hopes going into 2020 free agency.
It was also Knick fans’ biggest hopes going into 2010 free agency.
Maybe it appears the Knicks made a hasty choice in hitching their wagon to Rose and Wesley, James Dolan’s latest shiny baubles. But there’s nothing new about any of this. This is not some old rich guy marrying the latest thing to walk through the door, after who-knows-how-many divorces. It’s more like that same retired guy returning to his high-school sweetheart.
A decade ago when many teams—including the Bulls and Nets—assessed Wesley as a key adviser to LeBron James. In the run up, the Knicks found various ways to butter up Wesley.
At that time, Wesley was intently rehabilitating poor Eddy Curry, who had been through hell on—and mostly off—the court. Violent crime, a baby he saw for the first time after its death, lawsuits, injuries … Curry’s story is devastating.
Wesley cared. He had Curry, whose NBA career was on the rocks, move with him to Detroit. He got him a personal chef and a trainer, and had players like J.R. Smith and Chris Douglas-Roberts swing by to buoy his spirits. Curry clearly meant a lot to Wesley.
And so, James Dolan’s Knicks paid Curry, and stuck with him through the years approaching LeBron’s free agency. When Curry returned from injury early in the 2009-2010 season, Wesley flew to New Jersey to sit courtside and gave one of very few on-record interviews of his life, telling me he was there to support Curry.
Seeing Eddy Curry out there obviously means a lot for the Knicks. But also for you. Why?
Because of his personal struggle to get back to where he once was. There's a lot of people that doubt that he can get back to his form. He's trying. He's trying. This is just another step. The bar is being raised in each game.
Do you like his chances?
I like his chances.
These two teams we're watching, they're both banking on getting much better through free agency. If you could give them advice on how to succeed in attracting a premium free agent this summer, what would you say?
I'm not going to answer that question, because I think it's a set-up question. I'm here to talk about Eddy Curry, and to support Eddy Curry.
Curry played poorly in that game and rode the bench most of the year. He finished like a guy whose career was over, shooting 38 percent from the floor, with zero assists, and, amazingly, identical totals of rebounds, fouls, and turnovers. And yet, somehow he was still years from done. Curry averaged about 50 minutes per season over his last four years in the NBA. That he hung on so long is hard to imagine without Wesley in his corner.
Wesley was central to New York’s free-agent dreams in the summer of LeBron. It didn’t work. James went to Miami; Donnie Walsh was shocked. But Wesley remained close with the Knicks all the same. All kinds of people from Wesley’s sphere have come through the organization. There was Wesley, mentoring Allan Houston as he became a Knicks executive. He also had excellent relationships with Walsh, Jeff Van Gundy, and Van Gundy’s Knicks assistant coach, Tom Thibodeau (who became Wesley’s CAA client). I don’t know when Wesley met Knicks executive Scott Perry, but their biographies overlap in Michigan, in the Nike sphere, and at many NBA stops. After Rose and Wesley joined CAA, the Knicks hired some CAA clients, including David Fizdale. Knicks players with ties to Wesley include Curry, Carmelo Anthony, J.R. Smith … and every NBA player who ever played for John Calipari, including Julius Randle and Kevin Knox.
Also on that last list: players the Knicks dream of now, like Anthony Davis and Karl-Anthony Towns.
Here’s the most important William Wesley fact for Knick fans: Many years ago, I stood talking to him pre-game, in Philadelphia, when David Stern, then still commissioner, marched up, said hello, and validated one of Wesley’s key claims to fame. He thanked Wesley for getting NBA stars to play for Team USA. In other words, Wesley has more pull with Dream Teamers than … the NBA. Wesley can call the best players on the planet and say “I need you to play,” and they show up. (Many people told me Wesley stayed on the boat with the Dream Team at the Athens Olympics, which makes perfect sense.)
If you’re trying to get excited about something as a Knicks fan, get excited about that. He may not be the LeBron-whisperer he once was, but he has earned more than a little trust. From a 2010 TrueHoop post:
At the core of Wesley's power is the reality that elite professional athletes trust him. Most of them will say nothing on the record about him at all, out of respect for his desire to be behind-the-scenes, but those who do speak will, in my experience, generally say something along the lines of what Jerryd Bayless told me the day before he was drafted: "Wes has been a mentor to me. Helped me out. I have asked him questions about on the court stuff. Whatever I need. He has helped me. Never anything negative. I'll always respect and love him for that."
Or consider what LeBron James told GQ about Wesley: “He’s a great guy. I met him a few years back. He’s been a great role model to me. I can only say good things about him. ... What’s said, what goes on with, you know, our family, stays with our family. But as far as him being a good person—he’s always been good to me. He’s never asked me for anything. He’s always been trustworthy to me, and I respect him for that.”
Young athletes are faced with dizzying numbers of decisions for which they are often unprepared. This agent or that one? This shoe deal or that one? This trainer or that one? Almost anyone they ask has skin in the game, and can't advise honestly. College coaches tend to want all their players to go to one particular agent or sneaker company. When young basketball stars even go to a nightclub with friends, they have to worry that the friends may be getting a kickback from the club owner for bringing them there.
As athletes describe it, Wesley does not play those games. As players describe it, they tend to seek him out, not the other way around. For all of his critics and rivals, I have found it impossible to find an athlete who says Wesley abandoned him, ripped him off or misled him in some way. Professional athletes have a hard time trusting people. They hold almost all the power in sports, but are often unsophisticated in wielding it. There's a cavalcade of slimy people—from agents and college coaches to financial advisers and jewelry salespeople—who are intent on fattening their own pockets by tricking players into bad decisions.
Players have their guards up against that.
That means that when teams, agents, charities—even Team USA—want superstar athletes to show up somewhere, to work with a certain trainer, to lose some weight (think about Eddy Curry last summer), to do anything ... they often have a hard time getting players to buy in. They can come off like just another person trying to exploit players one way or another. It's hard to know who to trust. But "Uncle Wes"—with his big deep voice, his street smarts, his wealth of stories about his time with Michael Jordan in Chicago, his ability to make fun things happen and his unstoppable Rolodex—he's an easy person to want to believe.
And there's something of a race story here, too. A lot of the traditional powerbrokers in basketball—agents, executives, administrators and coaches and the like—have been white. Fairly or not, a lot of young black players have felt exploited by that system—you wouldn't believe the stories about agents ripping off their own players, for instance. Wesley navigates the scene in a different kind of skin, as a walking antidote to the idea that making it big means entrusting your career to the older, mostly white establishment. Instead, he's telling players to take charge of their own affairs. It's no accident that LeBron James has started his own business, with friends, to market himself. They may have mangled things at times—James reeled in a lot more endorsement deals when Aaron Goodwin was doing the work—but the ethic at work is that the player should be at the top of the business pyramid, not an agent or anybody else.
In the end, that's Wesley's message. Take care of your own business, on and off the court. Get your degree. Run your affairs. Show up to practice. Make a lot of money. Players want those things, and that's why they trust him. And that trust is why this summer the world is catching on to the idea that he may be the most important man in sports.
Wesley has this saying: “Everybody wants to make the quick nickel. Nobody wants to make a slow dime.” It means a lot of things. Get good grades! Eat right! Don’t get in trouble with the police! Think long term! But it applies every bit as much to Dolan. Will Rose and Wesley really have the time to go all in, building a program with the culture to lure the many players in their sphere? Phil Jackson was once seen as a genius with pull, too. Rebuilding in the NBA is a long-term project, Dolan is a short-term panic purchaser, throwing quick nickels at everything.
A MESSAGE FROM TRUEHOOP’S COO JUDY GOODWIN:
Now’s definitely the time to join TrueHoop. Henry and I just returned from a mind expanding week in The Information’s Accelerator in San Francisco. Here’s what The Information’s CEO Jessica Lessin had to say:
TrueHoop TV Live
Trade deadline subscriber conference call
Thursday evening TrueHoop subscribers joined TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott and David Thorpe, plus a special guest: Nevada Smith, a coach who pioneered life without a starting center working for Daryl Morey in the NBA’s D-League seven years ago. Some takeaways:
Marcus Morris Sr. to the Clippers makes the most difference to title odds, in the views of David Thorpe and our guest Nevada Smith (who has coached for the Rockets and Heat organizations). Smith now sees the Clippers as the title favorites. Thorpe picks the Clippers to win the West, and then to face a toss-up series against the Bucks.
The Heat worked magic in dumping big-money contracts of Dion Waiters and James Johnson without giving up any of their coveted affordable young players. And then they gave a ton of money to a 36-year-old Andre Iguodala and still only rank as the East’s fourth-best team in the views of Thorpe.
The Grizzlies and Timberwolves now have the young stars on board that they will build around for the long-term. David particularly likes the mix in Memphis.
The Warriors are playing a complicated game, amassing draft picks for players who will be too young to help them contend in Stephen Curry’s prime. But also: Thorpe and many NBA players suggest Andrew Wiggins might do a lot more in this setting.
The Lakers didn’t get anyone (other than retired shooter Darren Collison, who watched their Thursday night game from the stands and is rumored to be in the mix).
We’ll be doing more of these. Subscribe now so you can join.
Some more of what you’ve been missing over the last few weeks:
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The Rockets have the NBA’s second-best offense, best scorer, and real playoff aspirations. And they just went all-in on what has been seen as an interesting gimmick used mostly by bad teams in minor leagues: playing without a real center. Nobody knows if it will work or not. It’s wonderful or terrible. It’s certainly audacious and exciting. And it may even be working.
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Billionaires know how to party, in the Austin Powers sense, which seems creepier by the year.
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David Thorpe and I have been calling each other up and talking basketball since we had tiny kids. Now my oldest drives a car and his twins are making college selections. Our conversations have always been all over the place; David watches every team in the league on his four televisions, and has observations about everyone from Charlotte’s Devonte’ Graham to Sacramento’s Nemanja Bjelica. I, on the other hand, grew up in Portland, fell in love with the NBA listening to the Trail Blazers on my walkman, and generally try to steer the topic to Portland. He must get tired of this.
So it meant something the other day when David brought up the Blazers.
Thanks,
Judy