Z,
The Honorable was joking, obviously. My response to him was clearly meant as a joke, too.

PS why waste time speculating on LeBron trades? He ain’t going anywhere for at least the next 3 years, and Miami would never trade him here of all places.

:-)

The Honorable Cock Jowles: I’d give up Eddy Curry, Wilson Chandler, and a 1st-rounder for LeBron James. I mean, he’s obvious not a “winner,” so he can’t be worth that much.Right? ; )  (Quote)

Teams are just driving to the basket for layups and monster dunks.

Last year the team was fairly different – but the defense was equally bad. I put the blame squarely on the coach’s shoulders, even though I know making D’Antoni responsible for the Knicks play is not very popular in this blog. At some point, though, we won’t be able to ignore the writing on the wall any longer. Hopefully it will happen sooner than later – as a Knicks fan, I don’t want July 2011 to come with management talking about “starting the re-building process”, because it was supposed to have started 2 years ago, but the bad coaching decisions has the Knicks playing no better that Isiah’s teams.

Right? ; )

BigBlueAL: ess-dog, the Knicks actually held the Hawks to 43.8% shooting today and shot 47.3% themselves.Like you said the difference in the game was 3pt shooting where the Hawks made 6 more 3?s than the Knicks.Abasi, the Knicks came into today 19th in defensive efficiency and actually played pretty good defense today.They lead the league in shot blocks and are 5th in forcing turnovers.Defense is still their biggest problem w/o question but there defense this season has been alot better than in the past few years.No need whatsoever to overreact to losing to the Hawks today.  

Even though the Hawks were held to 43.8% FG%, I wonder sometimes about the effectiveness of the blocks and steals. A fairly high steal rate could possibly correlate with a high amount of steal attempts. This could mean that for every successful steal, a missed steal could give the opponent a small 5 on 4 advantage for a couple of seconds.

The high number of blocks also have to be considered as to how many of them are effective in giving back the possession to the Knicks. Let’s say you block a shot, only to have it blocked back to the opposing player for an easy shot. It’s something that Tim Duncan in particular does very in that he tends to block the ball towards his own man.

That being said, I like the blocking and steal attempts done by the team. Blocking makes the opponent think twice about running in for the layup. Steal attempts not only increase opponents turnovers (if the steal is successful anyway), but they also deflect balls often. This leads to a disruption in the offensive play of the opposing team.

I didn’t really see the game but from looking at the box score, the Knicks lost because they only shot 4-15 (26.7%) from the 3. 15 seems like a small amount of attempts.

It’s pretty glorious to watch.