Knicks Morning News (2018.10.28)

  • [SNY Knicks] Knicks’ Fizdale says Ntilikina ‘did a real solid job’ in first start at point guard
    (Saturday, October 27, 2018 5:24:02 PM)

    Knicks coach David Fizdale on Friday night was pleased with what he saw from Frank Ntilikina, who earned his first start at point guard at an opportune time against Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors.

  • [SNY Knicks] Warriors coach Steve Kerr sees bright future for Knicks and Nets
    (Saturday, October 27, 2018 1:54:26 PM)

    Steve Kerr believes the Knicks and Nets are both in good places to recruit top talent as they build up foundation.

  • [NYPost] Kevin Knox’s father gets hands-on with son’s shooting game
    (Saturday, October 27, 2018 10:50:30 PM)

    After Knicks rookie Kevin Knox’s 4-of-16 shooting performance in the season opener versus the Hawks on Oct. 17, his father took him for a drive. They piled into his truck, drove straight to the Knicks’ Tarrytown practice campus, turned on the lights and worked for 90 minutes — until 1 a.m. “I saw couple of…

  • [NYPost] Knicks facing a Frank Ntilikina dilemma
    (Saturday, October 27, 2018 1:28:21 PM)

    In his first NBA start as a point guard, Frank Ntilikina tied his career high of 17 points against the Warriors on Friday night, notching 13 in the first half. Coincidence? In each of his first five games as starting shooting guard this season, Ntilikina didn’t reach double figures. The 6-foot-6 Ntilikina was a pure…

  • [NYPost] Caris LeVert: The days of mocking Nets fans are over
    (Saturday, October 27, 2018 1:08:44 PM)

    Nets guard Caris LeVert takes a shot at some Q&A with Post columnist Steve Serby. Q: Are you guys determined not to live in the shadow of the Knicks? A: I don’t even think that’s something that we really think about. We know that we’re our own organization, our own people, we have our own…

  • 40 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2018.10.28)”

    I was wondering whether not getting an extension was going to change KP’s mindset about whether he should come back this year. That goes double because it’s not like the team is good enough to compete for a playoff spot. If he should get injured again before signing that extension he could cost himself a lot of money depending on how severe it is. I assumed it would change the math, but based on his Instagram post it sounds like he’s dying to play. So maybe it’s going to be entirely a matter of when he’s cleared.

    “I just wanna hoop.”

    I have to tell you, in almost every game the Knicks have dropped, the other team’s star seemed to be taking the game off until the game was on the line.

    This does not bode well for the Knicks

    @2 Perhaps because KD scored a game score against the knicks in their last quarter? What else made it seem this way?

    What exactly are the Knicks supposed to be if you’re expecting them to compete against a motivated top 30 in the world basketball player?

    I’ve seen the Warriors take half the game off, and that’s not what happened on Friday. They were showing a hell of a lot of petulance and frustration in the second and third quarters for a team that could win at any time. Once Durant started hitting they sailed and our guys kind of quit. But up to that point we played good defense and mediocre/poor offense.
    The point is that we’re really bad and very good players will find a way to beat us. That’s what happened Friday. We’re gonna rack up a lot of loses. But it is very nice to see us forcing full games out of opposing teams. The last few years good games have felt like things we’d just occasionally luck into – these are more deliberate.

    Firing Lue also means management doesn’t want to tank. Which is good for us.

    Not necessarily. Phoenix fired Earl Watson after an 0-3 start last year and proceeded to tank the hell out of the season.

    Firing Lue also means management doesn’t want to tank. Which is good for us.

    I think you could argue that once they lost Lebron, they didn’t want Lue anymore, but needed a good excuse to fire him. 0-6 would be just the excuse.

    I think Lue is a mediocre coach at best and it’s a good idea to move on, but I find it pretty weird to fire him specifically because the team is bad. Last night they started George Hill, Rodney Hood, Cedi Osman, Sam Dekker, and Tristan Thompson.

    Why wouldn’t you just fire him at the beginning of the offseason and let your new hire implement their stuff during training camp/preseason?

    I’m sure they felt like they “couldn’t” fire a coach coming off of 3 straight Finals appearances. They needed an excuse, like Brian said.

    They should hire Blatt back. If the whole goal of this season is to subtly stick it to LeBron, that would be a good way to do it.

    Yeah, that and Dan Gilbert is also not really known for having realistic expectations regarding his basketball team…

    Take away LeBron James and the Cavs are a sad sack organization that has sucked for a very long time.

    The last time the Cavs were a decent team without LeBron James, Wesley Person and Brevin Knight were the stars of the team.

    I think it’s an apt assessment that the only reason Lue was allowed to start the season was that they thought they had an actual team without LeBron. Otherwise, you clean house a la Nick Nurse and allow the rebuild to happen under the tutelage of a real NBA coach, not a well-liked personality manager who was savvy enough to let the greatest basketball talent of the young century do his thing.

    And again, I remind you that most NBA front offices have no fucking clue what they’re doing.

    Ayton looking like the smart pick at #1- if his passing is for real (4.7 assists per 36 against .9 turnovers) he’s as good an offensive center as anybody not named Jokic. I doubt he’s this good of a passer but if he had anyone who could get him the ball consistently (Booker is a total turnover machine) he’d be putting up monster numbers- He’s averaging 20.8 per 36 on just 18.9 usage. Looks like Ayton vs. Doncic is going to be an interesting argument for years to come.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msuMNdJz0Q0

    Shot attempts:

    15 foot jumper
    post headfake and layup
    one hand jump hook on the block
    face up 15 footer
    face up left elbow
    fed in the restricted area on a dribble drive, nice footwork
    beautiful footwork on matador defense, recovered from his defender guessing wrong
    (beautiful bounce pass to a driving teammate)
    lost the ball, recovered under the hoop
    PNR dunk
    fed in the restricted area
    backdoor dunk

    Yeah, he looks pretty damn legit. I would have taken Doncic #1 based entirely on his dominance in EL but as I said before the season, he looks a lot like David Robinson, body and all-around offensive game. Best thing out of these shot attempts is zero “bad” shots. I doubt he’ll be the league’s first volume scorer on .700+ TS% but it’s hard to argue with the pick right now.

    Yeah, Ayton is looking incredibly good. The way he moves is so fluid, it’s amazing to watch, jumper looks really good, the game doesn’t seem to be too fast for him to handle. The top of this draft class is looking so amazing, people aren’t even paying attention to what Bagley is doing in Sacramento because Doncic and Ayton look so ready and productive already.

    Ayton looks amazing and yet I still think he’ll be a “mistake” at #1 overall the same way Hakeem Olajuwon was.

    The Warriors hung on to beat the Nets, despite giving up 37 points in the fourth quarter when the Nets mounted a comeback, and from the box score Russell had a nice game. Russell seems better this year to me than he was last year. It’s his fourth year in the league and I think this is emblematic of how long it takes point guards to develop in the NBA, at least ones who were young when drafted. If Frank is finally an impact player on both ends of the court in his fourth year, that will actually be a normal pace of improvement.

    Condolences to Bruno today on the horrible election results.

    And another democracy bites the dust. This world is fucked.

    IMO, “the experts” don’t fully understand why teams get so bad when Lebron James leaves. One of the drawbacks to the “scoring point forward” model of basketball is that the teams are constructed differently. They don’t look for guards (especially point guards) that are play makers. They look for shooters to space the floor. So if that “point forward” leaves, not only is the team losing a high volume efficient scorer (which will do enough damage on it’s own), it is left with a poorly constructed team of shooters that have no one to play off and no high level play maker to help create good shots for others.

    The Cavs are not good now, but one major problem they have right is that they don’t have a true PG (because they didn’t need one as long as they had James). They have players whose game is dependent on playing off him and creating space for him. If they add a quality playmaking PG and rearrange the chairs on the Titanic, they can get better quickly because they still have some good talent there.

    Thank you silky and thcj, it’s been an extremely hard day. It’s a feeling of absolute hopelessness when you see and hear family members, old friends being an active part of electing an openly fascist president, and I really don’t know what to do now. As an activist my reaction is to take to the streets and protest as usual, but the fear of the promised violence is paralyzing, they have been threatening acts of violence on the university I study on and many others too.

    I always understood it was going to go down like this but it’s the saddest I’ve been in so many years.

    Bruno,
    I can imagine how you feel. My condolences too. It’s a depressing world these days.

    I always understood it was going to go down like this but it’s the saddest I’ve been in so many years.

    I’m sorry, Bruno. You are a great asset to your country, and I hope you don’t feel silenced. Often I come to this site just to read your perspective on things, basketball and otherwise.

    And it seems pretty silly to talk about basketball given events both in Brazil and the US and many other places right now. But since we’re here, and it’s been nagging me for a while, what is it that I’m not understanding about Nerlens Noel? Is he good or bad, amazing or terrible? Perplexed. (…gotta focus on the easy problems in life to figure out)

    The Knicks might actually have the rights to the Cavaliers 2nd round pick in 2019, but the Magic seem to have the option to swap that pick for theirs if they want to. The Knicks don’t have their own second round pick but they do have Houston’s se cond round pick. The Magic could also choose to swap for the Houston pick, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, if they don’t we probably have to send it to Sacremento as compensation for hiring Perry. So the net seems to be we will have the worst of the Cavaliers and Orlando second round picks in 2019. Both of those are likely to be decent second round picks, so at least we have something next season in the second round

    I know a few Brazilians. They all voted for Bolsonaro. And some of them are liberals. I don’t fully understand it, but I guess the stench of the Workers Party corruption was just so overwhelming that they felt like anything else was better. Let’s hope Bolsonaro doesn’t make everyone long for the days when their leaders merely stole from the people.

    In Cleveland, apparently Altman and Gilbert wanted more time for the young guys playing and Lue was playing Smith and Korver more than they liked.

    @31

    That’s the “main” narrative for people voting for him, yeah, and it’s been a long time since I supported the workers party… but I can’t understand why the hatred for PT can really outweigh everything else so much.

    Liberalism and conservative morals have been intertwined in Brasil for a long time, which is a weird pair that’s very peculiar to Latin American countries I would say, where the USA made pacts with the local elites in place (mostly farmers) to install authoritarian regimes that also forced liberal reforms.

    Thanks for the support everyone, I really appreciate it. I’ll stay safe and see how and where can I do my thing and it will be fine, I guess.

    Bruno, you have my best wishes. And possibly some company in a few years, looking at Salvini’s rise in Italy 🙁

    I’m sorry Bruno, best wishes to you, it’s another sad day for freedom.
    I can understand how you feel, I’m as concerned as Farfa with the situation in Italy and looking around the world (Brazil, US, Hungary, Austria to name a few) I could only agree with Jowles, this world is fucked.

    I know nothing about Brazilian politics and am defending no one, but I find it curious that Bolsonaro is being classified as a right wing extremist when he basically won in a landslide. This isn’t a case of an extreme right wing party winning slightly more votes than any other party and then forming an alliance with more moderate parties to form a government. By definition, “extremist” means you have a minority position. This guy cleaned everyone else’s clock. Regardless of what his politics are, he’s not an extremist in Brazil if he won in a landslide. Perhaps he’s an extremist relative to the far left wing in his own country and in the US media, but it sounds like whatever he is, for better or worse, he’s a mainstream Brazilian.

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