Big pick at number three with R.

J.

Barrett.

Um, what do you like about him?

Are you excited about being old?

Atlanta, You mentioned we extremely excited Teoh have RJ joining the New York Knicks.

Fierce competitors.

Ah, highly driven individual, very accomplished basketball player, you know, played tremendously.

Azat.

Ah, freshman player Duke.

This season, one of the leaders on that basketball team has a lot of winning in his background a day, every level and again.

We think he really fits the culture here in New York, and he's another young player that we're adding.

The toe admits that we're going to develop to keep getting better and keep getting this franchise better.

This is how you've planned toe to rebuild this team through the draft album.

Important of a night was tonight to get a player like him.

Very important.

You know, any time you can get a young man that you know projected to become a starter in this league, I think that's a that's a plus on again.

His mentality is the type of mentality that we aspired to have as a basketball team so we think he'll be one of the individuals That helps us set that type of approach to the game.

That tough, fierce, competitive approach team is willing to defend.

Get up and down the basketball floor and be very versatile because I think he brings ah lot of versatility of the basketball floor.

How much action did you get people wanting this pick?

A lot of people were excited by the top three of this draft.

How many phone calls did you take?

We took a few, but way stood the course because again, we we believe the in our board, and we believed that we would have a chance to get a very good basketball player once we knew we landed in the top three in the lottery.

So we're happy we stayed there were happy we have RJ coming to join us in about 10 days.

You have the most salary cap space available in the NBA.

What is your outlook for what you think you could accomplish with that space?

Well, we got a a draft to finish tonight before we turn attention too much on the free agency.

But again, we have an opportunity to continue to build this team this summer and we'll see whether summer takes us.

But again, we're very comfortable in building the way we've talked about from the very beginning, and Steve meals brought me here on board to join him.

We wanna build through the draft.

We want to develop young players and be opportunistic and free agency, and we'll see how opportunistic we happen to be this summer.

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