Steve Mills speaks about the Kristaps Porzingis trade during event

Knicks team president Steve Mills reiterated at a recent speaking event that Kristaps Porzingis requested a trade during that fateful meeting in January, and claimed that KP explicitly said he would not re-sign with the Knicks.

Mills was speaking at some kind of Fan Forum Series hosted by JPMorgan Chase & Co. The full context of the situation was not available, as the only video posted was a 34 second clip that cuts off just as Scott Perry begins to piggyback on what Mills was saying.

In the clip, Mills restates the company line, which is that Porzingis marched into that late January meeting and demanded to be dealt. Additionally, Mills said that Porzingis provided an ultimatum: if the Knicks didn’t trade him in seven days, he’d flee to Europe, where perhaps he was planning to either rehab or soak in some serious culture.

The seven day thing obviously elicits thoughts of The Ring, a movie that was almost as terrifying as the Knicks’ 2018-19 season.

Mills also detailed how, luckily, probably by chance, the Knicks had already been plotting a potential Porzingis trade for months prior to the January meeting. Since they had multiple offers on the table, they chose to waste no time, dealing Porzingis almost immediately.

March Berman of the New York Post noticed the Tweet and felt the need to note that nothing about this is new; we’ve already heard this story.

The guy who posted the original Tweet, also known as @KnicksGuy1, was confused by Berman’s aggressive nature.

One wonders how the Knicks brass would respond if someone had asked the following follow ups at this event: why do you think Porzingis wanted to be traded? Could the situation with Porzingis possibly have been fixed?

The Knicks have done a really great job carefully continuing to nudge their narrative into the public arena, and it now seems to be generally accepted that Porzingis wanted out, so the Knicks had no choice but to trade him.

For Porzingis’ part, he’s had a tumultuous time since being traded, to say the least. He was accused of rape but says that he’s actually being extorted, not to mention the fight in Latvia that left his face bloodied and his shirt in tatters.

In the wake of the trade, Porzingis told Knicks fans to stay woke, but a major chunk of the fanbase seems to have decided that KP was no unicorn, but instead a snake who slithered his way out of town.

The Knicks persistence in pushing the story that KP demanded a trade feels weird, and hopefully next season, when he’s finally back on the court, Porzingis will finally provide some context for what led to his decision to seek an exit from New York.

Of course, maybe Mills is telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and this nagging feeling that there’s much more to the story is just bias from witnessing two decades of Knicks mismanagement.