we have another month until this conversation is relevant.
The knicks will not buy him out until after the trade deadline. Otherwise why bother?
Yeah seriously. It's just wouldn't be good business to buy him out when there was still hope for a trade. Everyone just take some deep breaths and wait.
James Dolan wipes his butt with a million bucks. The only reason this "negotiation" happens it to give the Knicks an excuse to drag it out until the trade deadline. There is no way that team ever had intentions of buying him out prior to the deadline. It's just stupid. It's a huge expiring contract and the next month is supposed to produce a flurry of trades from teams that want to cut costs. All I keep reading about is how we will see at least a dozen players switch teams by this deadline, because of financial reasons in this struggling economy. So the Knicks will just hang on "just incase" some desperate GM offers up some players.
The thing is... the Knicks have made it painfully clear that they aren't going to take back contracts that run past 2010 (for obvious reasons)... so the only trades that make any sense from the Knicks standpoint is to trade Marbury (expiring this year) for a guy who expires next year. And I don't see a lot of player/situations out there that make a lot of potential sense. For example, you could say "what about the Bobcats deciding to dump Raja Bell and Boris Diaw", but Diaw is signed past 2010. Regardless, the Knicks will hang onto Marbury until after the deadline passes... and then buy him out as expected. No sense in them wasting an opportunity even if it's a unlikely opportunity.
Plus, common sense says they'd wait until after Boston visits New York on Feb 6th.
Edit. Btw... the only kind of trade that would make any sense would be something like this:
http://games.espn.go.com/nba/features/traderesult?players=509~556~849&teams=23~18~18&te=&cash=A bad team looking to dump a years worth of salary. And then the Kings would probably buy out Marbury anyways.