There was a time when walking into Madison Square Garden for a Knicks game felt like legitimate basketball, and not the Barnum and Bailey circus that comes to the Garden in the offseason.

Between Isiah Thomas and Stephon Marbury alone – dare I call them the Ringling Bros. – the team has become the laughing stock of the league. The season started with an embarrassing sexual harassment trial where the team’s head coach and president was the defendant, and with a series of bizarre (to be polite) interviews from Marbury.

Knick fans looked at this and said, “Well at least it can’t get any worse than this.”

They were wrong. Painfully wrong.

The Knicks just concluded an abysmal season where they won 23 games, lost 59, and at no point seemed to care. In fact, Knick fans were subjected to the ridiculous press conferences where Thomas claimed they were heading in the right direction. Now the only direction Thomas is heading is out of town (well, sort of), and that is the first step in the right direction the Knicks have taken in a while.

Where do the Knicks go from here? There was a time when they were a proud franchise. How do they get that back?
First step is to hire a coach. Thankfully, Thomas is out. The leading candidate now is Mark Jackson, and I think he is a good fit for New York despite never coaching an NBA game. New York’s players are in need of a new leader, and someone like Jackson, who is a “New York guy”, and who played the game the right way would be a good influence on these players who seemed to lack discipline. Other candidates include Knicks assistant Herb Williams and Celtics assistant Tom Thibodeau, but Jackson is the best option.

The next biggest challenge for the Knicks is personnel. Simply put, they need to overhaul their roster. The problem is however, that not many teams are not interested in washed up players with bloated contracts (see Jerome James, Jared Jeffries, Quentin Richardson, Malik Rose, Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph).

So here’s what they need to do. For starters they need to get rid of either Eddy Curry or Zach Randolph. The Curry/Randolph experiment didn’t work out (is anybody surprised?), and in order for the Knicks to be a functional team they need to get rid of at least one. In a toss-up like this, I would normally say get rid of the big man who is slow, can’t rebound and is a defensive liability, but with these two, it’s tough to tell which one that is.
 
Randolph may be easier to move because he still averaged a respectable 17.6 points and 10.3 rebounds this year. He was also almost dealt to Milwaukee for a package of players at the trade deadline. A deal like that, or any deal for these two underachievers, could bring in some young talent to work with the young nucleus of guys like Nate Robinson, David Lee, Renaldo Balkman, Mardy Collins and Wilson Chandler. Surely these names don’t inspire too much confidence, but each has shown promise at times, and given the right situation, they can fill roles and be a part of a successful team.

Being that New York will probably not be able to make any other moves based on their lack of tradeable pieces, the next, and probably only big splash the Knicks can make is in the draft. They are assured at least a top eight pick, and have a chance of scoring big in the lottery and getting a top three pick. This will likely be one of new team president Donnie Walsh’s first decisions with the Knicks, and he can’t miss.

The Knicks, needing a point guard (among other things), may want to look at one of the point guard prospects that figure to be early selections. The prize would obviously be Derrick Rose, but they would have to get lucky in lottery to get him. They could also fall back on either USC’s O.J. Mayo, Arizona’s Jerryd Bayless or Indiana’s Eric Gordon. All project to be point guards, and all project to be top-10 picks.

If they don’t go the point guard route, the Knicks could look to shore up their small forward position with someone like LSU’s Anthony Randolph or Syracuse’s Dante Green, or try to improve the team’s interior defense with seven-foot centers in Texas A&M’s DeAndre Jordan or Stanford’s Brooke Lopez. New York has been last in the league in shot blocking the last two years, but how could you be surprised with the likes of Curry, Randolph, Rose and James patrolling the paint.

The one undeniable thing is the Knicks cannot miss with this pick. They forfeited early selections to Chicago the last two years because of the trade for Curry, and now they have a chance to make a big splash and give the roster a shot of adrenaline.

Picks and trades aside, the main objective for the Knicks for the next two summers is to not add any extraneous payroll. Thomas has already put them in a hole deeper than a Maya Angelou poem, but after a few buy outs and hopefully a few trades, the Knicks could be out of cap trouble by the summer of 2010, which just happens to be the summer LeBron James and Dwyane Wade become free agents.

There was a time when players like James and Wade would have loved to come to the New York, but after a string of embarrassing seasons, the Knicks will need a lot of money, and a little bit of luck, if they ever want to lure top notch free agents. 

There was also a time when Knicks basketball felt more like basketball and less like a circus. This offseason will be a big step in getting that feeling back.

Anthony Oliva III is a senior journalism student at Penn State University. He can be contacted at anthony.oliva3[at]gmail.com.