Regarding Duhon, I think we’ll have to wait to see if his shooting reverts to the mean or he remains in a funk and below his longer term average TS%. If you believe it was more than a random distribution of poor luck then it’s possible it started out random and became psychological. There was no physical reason for it that I am aware of. If it was psychological, then I suspect D’Antoni thought benching him would do permanent damage. That’s why he stuck with him. Coach has hinted at that kind of thing.

Regarding Chandler, I think you exaggerated a bit, but I got a chuckle out of it. ;-) Early in the season he was shooting well below is own typically inefficient norm. Recently he has been shooting above it. He’s not a very consistent sort or much of an outside shooter, but I think the mean reversion that is already almost complete demonstrates that it might have been a bad idea to bench him and damage him psychologically (assuming you believe what D’Antoni believes about that sort of thing).

re: Ariza… I don’t disagree with a lot of what you say, but Ariza hasn’t only played in LA previously. He had as good a season in Orlando as in LA. At each of his stops (NY, Orlando, LA, and even a little in Houston) he’s been an effective slasher who gets to and finishes at the basket. I don’t think that’s ascribable to his teammates. The playoffs last season were pretty obviously a fluke (48% 3-pt shooting after he shot 32% on the season…); although, he might not feel that way with all the jumpers he’s been taking. His increased usage has increased the % of jump shots he takes he’s not a very good jump shooter. We discussed this at length in a previous thread, but since he’s playing SG in Houston with Battier, Scola, and Hayes as the frontline he plays with most of the time, he’s relied on as a perimeter jump shooter. At some point missing those jumpers hurts the team, and I think we’re probably at that point. His 2nd most common 5 man group features jump shooters Chase Budinger and David Andersen, and that has been a really good unit for Houston in the minutes they’ve played.

re: Duhon and Chandler… It’s a little beyond the point of Chandler missing shots being a random poor stretch. His making shots recently is more likely to be a random good stretch, but who knows maybe he surprises me.
Duhon’s slump was long enough that I wouldn’t ascribe it to luck, either. Certainly one expected him to snap out of it at some point, but that was a lot of games and a lot of really piss poor shooting. I see your point about sticking with your guys for psychological reasons, which seems like something a lot of coaches do. Sticking with Duhon that whole stretch very likely cost the Knicks a few wins, though. I have no idea what’s going on behind the scenes, so maybe D’Antoni and Duhon talked extensively about what was going on and D’Antoni concluded that it was bad luck and he might break out of it any day. I wasn’t necessarily in favor of benching him long-term, just giving him a couple days off to clear his mind or possibly to take care of any mental, emotional, or physical issues that were behind the bad shooting. If others stepped up in his place, keep him on the bench. If not, bring him back after a few games off.
I’m also not so sure about Duhon being such an important core player for D’Antoni. He certainly seems to have some leadership and b-ball IQ, but on the whole he’s pretty mediocre and very replaceable. Same for Chandler. It’s not like we’re talking about Nash and Amare here.

He seems to be more willing to shuffle the line up looking for good combinations and bench players that are doing stupid things and not working hard than benching players for missing shots.

Ariza was not a primary scoring option for LA. He typically used his athletic talents to get to the basket and take wide open shots when he had a chance or when his defender left him to double team one of the primary scoring options (usually Kobe). That’s all LA wanted or needed from him because they have so much offensive fire power. Anyone that watched the playoffs last year could see that most of LA’s opponenents opted to leave Ariza wide open and double Kobe instead. Ariza has always beeen a suspect outside shooter and Kobe will kill almost anyone with all single coverage. However, Ariza got on a roll from the outside and made them pay. I thik that was one part getting wide open looks (a benefit of playing with Kobe) and one part positive random distribution.

On Houston, he’s being asked to shoot more, score more, and be a primary scoring option because the team doesn’t have many high quiality scorers that can create and get shots at will. So he has had to expand the types of shots he takes and is not open nearly as often. Slashing dunks and wide open looks because of a double team are not available in the quantities he’s being asked to score.

He could easily revert back to being a low usage slashing scorer, but then someone else on Houston would have to pick up the shooting and scoring slack. That person could easily be a worse scoring option than the extra shots that Ariza is taking now. That’s something that Houston is going to have to work out over time.

Are the Knicks making a higher percentage of their shots because of a random distribution of good luck or are they passing better and making better decisions which in turn is leading to higher percentage shots which they are now making?

My view is that it’s a little of both.

In the first few weeks they were both playing poorly and getting bad luck and now they are playing better and getting above average luck.

The “luck” or randomness factor is the thing that tends to mean revert, but I think the better play may be sustainable. So I would conclude the Knicks are a lot better than they were the first few weeks, but not quite a good as the recent few weeks.

LB was annoying, and at some point I would agree he was counterproductive, with all the line-up tinkering he did. In the case of the 6 game win streak, though, he really didn’t tinker much afterwards. He kept the exact same (unorthodox) starting line-up and largely the same rotation for 2 games after the streak and then when Steph went down with injury continued with the same starting line-up with Jamal in Steph’s place for the next two games. Davis was suspended the next game, so Frye took his spot. Then, after a nice 5 game losing streak, he started tinkering. A lot of coaches on losing teams fall into this habit. Not to the extent that Brown did, but it’s hard not to at some point… especially when you have the depth of mediocrity that the Knicks had.

D’Antoni’s decision to have some patience and stick with the guys he felt gave him the best chance to win even when they kept losing seems to have worked out so far, and is a big difference between his approach and Brown’s, definitely.

I sort of feel like by citing this you are undermining your own point, which seems to be, players will regress (or return) to the mean, coaching is negligible over the course of the season vs. actual player talent. (Maybe this was just a point in this thread, not your point and I am losing track…)

But the screaming difference between this season and that one is our current coach seems invested in trying to win games, whereas LB clearly had a different agenda.

LB fancied himself a Bill Parcells/Mike Keenan type. He was here to reshape, bring in his own people, break down whatever existing star system was in place, blah, blah, blah–whatever rationalizes his schtick. D’Antoni seems genuinely embarrassed by the losing and I don’t think he’s satisfied saying the season is a throwaway.

We can trade psychological profiles all we want, but I think you’d agree that LB and MD were/are operating under different agendas. To the point at hand, LB’s tinkering directly deflated any chance of the Knicks continuing a hot streak, whereas we can guess Mike is going to keep playing it similarly to how he is right now. The Knicks have chance of continuing in a similar vein now, whereas LB’s Knicks seemed directly affected by his weird machinations.

Maybe given the relative talent involved, it won’t really matter, but again this might be where a fan perspective, as strictly a fan, overrides: I have more hope that this team will be competitive for the rest of the season than I did at the point where I realized LB was grinding his own axe that didn’t have much to do with the Knicks winning games, at least not the games they were currently playing.

I don’t think you can blame the fall off after that on Steph getting hurt. He played well in the 2 losses after the streak, and played in 7 of the next 10… which was a 1-9 stretch for the Knicks. Maybe he was hurt the whole time, but he played pretty well in most of the games.

During the win streak the Knicks shot the ball well from 3 on most nights, and only 1 opponent topped 30% from 3 (Seattle took 35 3PAs and hit 40%). Only one other opponent topped 24% from 3. They were coming off a 1-9 stretch, the coach shook up the starting line-up, a sweet shooting young bigman in his second season was stroking it (Frye), and the vets were playing way better than you would expect based on their histories. Everyone was contributing. They beat 4 teams with winning records, including a 50 game winner and 2 60 game winners.

I’m not saying that the endings will be the same and there are plenty of differences, but there are some definite parallels between these two streaks.

I agree and my impression is also that his recent play has to do with coaching (he had 6 dunks in the NO game… I wonder if he’s ever had 6 dunks in a game before…). I just wonder if it will last. He had hot stretches last season, too, but mixed in enough clunkers and cold stretches that he wasn’t very good on the season.

D’Antoni has been sticking with him for 1.25 seasons and he’s not been a good NBA player on the whole of that period.

“Re: the value of close losses to good teams, we’ll just have to agree to disagree here.”

As Mike said recently, bad teams lose a lot of close games. Bad teams also beat good teams. Two of Minni’s 3 wins are against Denver and Utah. Washington has beaten Dallas, Cleveland, and Miami. Pacers beat the Celtics by 9 points. 5 of Cleveland’s 7 losses are to teams under .500 on the season, 4 of Denver’s 7 plus the Bucks (.500 right now), and 3 of Dallas’ 7.

” I think the turnaround for this team started with gaining confidence vs. Celtics, Lakers, Denver, and Orlando (at least the first game,) teams that are on their way to 60-win seasons.”

The question is not whether those losses led to a 5-1 run, but whether this level of play can be sustained all season.
I agree that they have played better since D’Antoni made the coaching change that the whole world was calling for 13 games ago when they had a few days off. I understand why you are lumping all 13 games together.
My point, though, was that the 5-1 run makes the 7-6 run. If they continued their 2-5 ways and were 2-4 or 1-5 through the last 6 games, there would be little reason to be excited. They’d be 3-9/4-9 over that stretch and 4-19/5-18 overall. We could be happy about moral victories and solid effort, but they’d still be terrible. The 5-1 run has made the season to date.

“Orlando (at least the first game,)”

Who single-handedly kept them in the game for the first 1/2 of the the 4th Quarter, then got benched starting during the very next game?

“Re Larry Brown, I thought I alluded to that already in a response to irvin. Didn’t Steph get injured, putting them in a 2-20 tailspin? Injuries could derail any team.”

I was mixing up two different seasons. They started 8-15 in 06-07 when Isiah was the coach and they won 33 games. They beat 3 teams with a winning record and 1 .500 team in that stretch. So far this season the Knicks have also beaten 3 teams with winning records (to this point in the season) in their first 8 wins. The point was just that at 8-15 you’re more likely to be headed for a losing season than a winning one. You can look at recent play and anticipate a strong finish and 35-40+ win season, but you can also look at the overall picture and anticipate a 30-35 win season, at best.
With Larry Brown as coach the Knicks started 6-11 (similar winning % to 8-15, over fewer games obviously). They then dropped 10 of their next 11 before the 6 game win streak.