Brock Aller, a longtime Cavaliers executive and confidant of owner Dan Gilbert, has agreed to join the Knicks front office in a high-ranking position, sources told the Daily News.
Barring anything unforeseen, Aller’s hiring is expected soon. It will be the first major move from new president Leon Rose, who took over about two weeks before the coronavirus shutdown. Aller, known as a capologist, served as a personal assistant to Gilbert for 10 years before a promotion in 2017 to senior director of basketball operations.
The Knicks asked and received permission to interview Aller prior to the coronavirus shutdown, according to sources. He was “instrumental” in the Cavaliers trade with the Knicks for JR Smith and Iman Shumpert in 2015, according to Gilbert. At the time, Smith was a client of Rose, the longtime agent at CAA.
“(Aller)'s probably one of the finer capologists in the league,” Gilbert told Cleveland.com in 2017. "He knows more about the cap than probably PricewaterhouseCoopers knows about the IRS code. He lives with the cap, with the collective bargaining agreement.
“He comes up with ideas on things that the league has never heard of, they have to go into their committees to check if it's OK or not. He's sort of a savant with this. He's a space-creator, the kind of space that (Cavs GM Koby Altman) will need in the cap. He was involved in probably every trade the last few years in a creative sense.”
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