Each weekday for the next two weeks, we’ll be counting down the NBA Draft lottery teams leading up to the June 26th draft. It would be a fool’s errand to project what each team will do; tryouts vary by day and if anything, that’s an exercise in futility we’ll post at 5 p.m. on draft day. Instead, what you’ll be reading is what we would do if we were running each team.

We’re not ashamed to admit this, though perhaps we should be: At the time, we thought the deal for Starbury was a good one, and at the time, we thought the Isiah-as-GM move would work. Obviously, both failed miserably. Isiah has been dumped, and Marbury gets to collect $21 million this year, the final one of his bloated contract. It is widely believe that new coach Mike D’Antoni wants nothing to do with the self-proclaimed best point guard in the NBA.

So the Knicks will go with a guard. They The are set up front, even if you hate Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph. David Lee is a scrappy and hungry reserve, and as D’Antoni reportedly told Arizona point guard Jerryd Bayless during an interview: “I have all the tools, I just need an engine to run it.”

The choices: D Rose (he’ll be gone), OJ Mayo (he’ll be gone), Indiana’s Eric Gordon or Bayless. (Westbrook is also obviously an option, but he has very little experience running a team. That’s been the job of Darren Collison.) We think the Knicks should take Gordon. The only question – if D’Antoni is trying to re-create what Bryan Colangelo built in Phoenix, will he see Bayless more of a Nash type?

Gordon is 6-3, 222 and pairing his offensive prowess with that of Jamal Crawford would gives the Knicks a formidable, high-scoring backcourt. Not that Bayless (6-3, 204) wouldn’t. We’d love to see Gordon and Bayless play one-on-one; Bayles, the latest in a long line of stellar Arizona PGs, is cat-quick, while Gordon is smooth and perhaps slightly more aggressive. It’s difficult to authoritatively say which is player is better based on stats – Gordon played in the rough-and-tumble, defensive-minded Big 10, and Bayless battled injuries and the best conference in the country. Gordon’s got him in wingspan on bench press, and we choose him for an old fashioned reason: We like what we saw out of him before the Kelvin Sampson fiasco exploded and ruined the team.

6. New York Knicks – Eric Gordon, Indiana
7. Los Angeles Clippers – Russell Westbrook, UCLA
8. Milwaukee – DeAndre Jordan, Texas A&M
9. Charlotte – Kevin Love, UCLA
10. New Jersey – Anthony Randolph, LSU
11. Indiana – Roy Hibbert, Georgetown
12. Sacramento – JaVale McGee, Nevada
13. Portland – Joe Alexander, West Virginia
14. Golden State – Darrell Arthur, Kansas