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Report: New York Knicks Give Up Three Players To Acquire Wesley Matthews

The former undrafted free agent is on his way to New York by way of a trade.... at least for now.

NBA: Dallas Mavericks at Indiana Pacers
Time trade that shade of blue for another, Wesley.
Brian Spurlock-USA TODAY Sports

In what turned into a whirlwind Thursday, the New York Knicks struck a deal with the Dallas Mavericks, according to literally any NBA media source you can think of, sending three players to Texas in order to acquire the services of former Marquette guard Wesley Matthews, along with two other now former Mavericks.

Okay, okay, okay, the headline is misleading. This trade is always going to be remembered as “The Kristaps Porzingis Trade,” as any level headed NBA analyst will tell you that the 7’3” Latvian is the primary piece of this trade, even though he’s still sitting out this season while recovering from an ACL injury. Things got completely wild with this deal coming through today. I’m going to drop in tweets from everyone’s favorite NBA insider, Adrian Wojnarowski. Keep your eyes on the timestamps.

THAT’S JUST OVER TWO HOURS.

WHAT. THE. HELL. IS. HAPPENING.

[ahem]

Matthews is in the fourth year of a four year contract that is paying him over $18 million this season. As such, he’s a candidate to have his contract bought out by the Knicks, but at the time of this writing, there’s nothing official to indicate that’s happening, at least not right away. The NBA’s trade deadline is February 7th, so there’s still a week to go for the Knicks to attempt to leverage what they have on their roster into another deal, at least in theory.

The former Golden Eagle and former Marquette TBT team head coach is averaging 13.1 points, 2.3 rebounds, and 2.3 assists per game while starting in all 44 of the 50 Mavericks games that’s he’s appeared in this season. In fact, over the past seven seasons, Matthews has started in all but one of his 469 appearances in the NBA. That’s an amazing level of consistency for a guy who went undrafted in 2009, fought his way onto the Utah Jazz roster and then impressed then-head coach Jerry Sloan so much that he shipped the starting shooting guard out of town in order to get more minutes for Matthews on a playoff team.

I would imagine that, as someone who is still averaging over 29 minutes per game and 13 points per game while shooting 38% from long range, Matthews will get attention from other NBA teams to continue his run in the league. The question that now faces us is whether that will be over the next few days or if Matthews will be waiting until the summer to find a new permanent address.

As you can tell, this is something of a developing story, so we’ll have more on this as needed down the road.