you can take a mediocre team and make them pretty good scorers with a great offensive mind BUT you can’t take any ole guy off the street and get him to play good defense. defense has its own mindset and skillset, and you can’t expect an offensive minded coach to coax the best defense out of hacks. i’m looking at Jeffries, Sheldon Williams and Turiaf right now.

Horrible use of Time Outs and green light to take jumpers (especially 3 pters).

When the Knicks let the Celtics come back and go on a 23-4 fourth Q run, that inexcusable. when a team allows that it falls on the coach’s shoulders. no coach should allow the opposing team to score that many points while watching his own team’s jumpers clank off the rim.

He needs to learn when his players aren’t hitting their jumpers, maybe 3 in a row, to call a time out, regroup and call a play for a drive to the basket. get SOME points. ANY points. don’t go 3, 4 5 possessions without scoring any points. no one cares if you can’t play defense. if you can score and that’s your strength then score. but don’t have a horrible defensive team AND allow your team to go scoreless for minutes on end. if you can’t give us a good, decent defensive team then your offensive gameplan needs to be stellar.

how many times have we watched a game and we’ve watched the whole team try to play the “i’m gonna be the guy whose jumper falls in this time” game? put it on the floor, dribble and drive to the basket and get your points to stop the bleeding.

I’m going to come up with a new stat for Billups where I count the number of times per game he tries to draw a 4 point play, doesn’t get the call and ends up jacking up a horrible 3. Has to be at least 3 times a game.

It is pretty hilarious.

The Honorable Cock Jowles: Billups hasn’t been nearly as bad as y’all are making him out to be. His stats (aside from a huge drop in TS% and eFG%, the latter of which is still higher than league average) are almost exactly what they were in Denver, only with better OREB%.  (Quote)

actually he is since really TSP is the only thing that he is exceptional at from a statistical standpoint. With NYK that TSP is still padded by those three games of 40-50 FTA, which is the foundation of his high TSP anyhow. HE doesn’t crack the top 20 in Assist % or anything other than FT% (and TSP and off rating which I presume is largely based on TSP and as such somewhat duplicative kind like usage and PER). We can’t forget that Marburyesque stand sideways while your guy gets a layup or be nowhere in your frame as a defensive rebound is pushed up the court defense now can we.

Brian Cronin: Replacement Level Yankee Blog is definitely the equivalent of Knickerblogger. They’re both stats-driven blogs.  

RLY is definitely the most stat-oriented. It has a lot of original analysis and it gets seriously granular with the raw data, so much so that I get lost often.

RAB is an excellent mix of reporting, analysis, introducing readers to advanced stats, and has a really tight-knit commenter community. They have a partnership with YES. Two of the three main writers also write for Fangraphs.

Turiaf: 4.4 million
Draft Pick: 2 million
Balkman: 1.6 million
+ fields, Walker and 2-3 vet’s minimum guys probably gets us there.